Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

ergative case-marked lexical noun phrase such as lugal.e and the pronouns such as za.e, I
propose that the third way of topic-marking in Sumerian is through the use of otherwise
facultative possessive pronoun constructions such as lugal.œu 10 ‘my king’. Since
Sumerian lacks determiners like those found in English and similar languages and over
time the use of full demonstratives seems to have attenuated somewhat (cf. Woods 2001,
25-184), I hypothesize that Sumerian might be using possessive constructions as a means
of coding definiteness and that since topics are regularly definite, in its written
incarnation, Sumerian might well have used a somewhat artificial convention such as
possessive pronoun constructions to indicate that a particular noun phrase was topical. I
have not attempted to defend this view in itself, but if the derivation of *mini-√ from *bi-
√ can be taken as evidence, then it lends some support to my suggestion.
If it is in fact the case that Sumerian codes definiteness through the addition of a
possessive pronoun, does this imply that bare, unmodified nouns in Sumerian are
indefinite? For the most part, bare nouns in Sumerian are simply unmarked for
definiteness. But in one particular environment, bare nouns in Sumerian do seem to
display what is known as a definiteness effect: a restriction in a particular
morphosyntactic environment that allows only indefinite nouns to occur in that
environment. Only when affected by focus as in the answer to a wh-question or in
contrast with an alternative, do environments that display a definiteness effect allow a
definite noun to occur. The classic example of this kind of alternation is the existential
sentence in English with expletive there as in the following examples.
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