Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

5.3 Conclusions and prospects
Of the many hypotheses, proposals and suggestions included in this dissertation, two
strike me as particularly important: (a) the interpretation of the *bi-√ verbal prefix in the
BNBV inal construction as a (low source) applicative in that it incorporates and extends
previous work on the directive case hypothesis in a model that allows for typological
comparison, and (b) the opposition between topic-marking using the possessive pronoun
topic-marking construction (*NP-bi) and the role of focus in the *XP nam bi-√
construction. The further extension of recent work on applicative typology and
interpretation (particularly within the Distributed Morphology framework) to some of the
other recalcitrant verbal prefixes in Sumerian as well as an investigation of the
quantificational properties of the different verbal prefixes would, in my view, be quite
fruitful and I hope to continue with the investigation of the some of the other classes of
the *bi-√ prefix and other related prefixes in future. But it is the second of the two
conclusions, namely the opposition between topic and focus in Sumerian, that deserves
further attention and research by all those who work on Sumerian morphosyntax and the
literature that it encodes.
The most productive avenue to substantive progress in our understanding of
Sumerian morphosyntax is undoubtedly further investigation of topic and focus in. In
particular, the connections between possession, definiteness and topicalization, which I
have attempted to elucidate in this study, are in need of a great deal of additional
research, particularly if such research manages to identify further connections between
these features and certain components of the verbal prefix. At the same time, additional
331