Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

causative environment described by Garrett would have been represented by a zero
element in the immediately preverbal slot. If this scenario is valid, then we have to
acknowledge the possibility that two, homophonous systems of preverbal “agreement”
may either coexist within the Sumerian of the text-artifactual record, or at least in one of
the historical phases that immediately precedes the attested documentation. If so, then we
should expect that BNBV inal predicates would preserve the older system of pronominal
agreement—whatever that might be (for my suggestion that it was a switch-reference
system, see the discussion following example [31] in section 3.3). At the same time,
causative alienable BNBV predicates would exhibit a distinct system of agreement
involving some form of agreement with the causee. Since this is not, however, a study of
the alienable BNBV class of predicates, I do not go into the matter further here, but it
should be emphasized that such a historical scenario would lead us to expect that the
preverbal pronominal agreement markers may well function quite differently depending
on the lexical class of the main verb and the morphosyntactic environment in which they
occur.
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