Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

einterpreted as an ergative postposition. At the same time, the low transitivity and
coreferentiality of possessor/ergator and bare noun in BNBV inal constructions would have
blocked the development of ergativity in BNBV inal clauses. The three possible functions
of the old locative postposition can, therefore, be represented as follows:
Form Environment Function
*NP animate/inanimate-e BNBV alienable ergative
*NP inanimate-e BNBV inal ablative
*NP animate-e BNBV inal possessor/allative
But a second component of the Coghill/Deutscher hypothesis also seems to play a role in
the formation of the Sumerian preverbal agreement system.
One of the most interesting components of the Coghill/Deutscher hypothesis is their
suggestion that the preverbal pronominal markers of ergative case in ˙amt¬u clauses
originate from the *bi- and *ni- verbal prefixes in verbs in which the original preverbal
pronominal element is absent. The suggestion that verbs of the form …n-√gu 7 might
derive from an underlying form such as …ni-Ø-√gu 7 was first proposed by Krecher
(1979) and subsequently adopted by a number of authors (see references in Coghill and
Deutscher 2002, 285, fn. 52). Coghill and Deutscher argue that the form that has
undergone vowel syncope was subsequently reanalyzed as an ergative agreement marker,
but their argument actually makes much more sense in a Type C model of the
development of ergativity, particularly if we assume the null or impersonal agent of the
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