Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

Here in the realm of participial constructions and nominalized verbs, we do find the kind
of system of demoted agents that Coghill and Deutscher imagine. In (73), the locative-
terminative marks either the original goal argument (the most likely interpretation), or
represents the demoted patient within an antipassive rection (Michalowski 2003, 200; cf.
Johnson 2000 and Rubio forthcoming, §3.13.2), whereas in (74), the locative-terminative
marks what might be termed a demoted agent. The contrast in meaning between the
locative-terminative in (73) and (74) seems to be determined by whether the participle at
the end of each phrase is active, as in (73), or passive (and perfective), as in (74): this
type of tense/aspect split, in which a locative adpositional phrase acts as agentive adjunct
with a transitive perfective participle would correspond precisely to the examples of a
tense/aspect split from Middle Indic and Iranian as presented by Garrett (1990, 263-264)
except for the fact that there appears to be no evidence that these perfective/passive
participial constructions were ever reanalyzed as active finite verbs in Sumerian (one of
the primary requirements for a subsequent reinterpretation of the agentive adjunct as
ergative). The opposition between (73) and (74), in other words, would have provided an
ideal environment for the type of tense/aspect-driven split ergativity envisioned by
Coghill and Deutscher, but there is no evidence that such a grammaticalization ever took
place.
Within a Type C model of the development of ergativity as outlined by Garrett for
Hittite, there are three necessary components of the morphosyntactic environment in
which ergativity arises: (a) a transitive verb, (b) a null (or impersonal) agent, and (c) an
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