Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

Therefore, it should be apparent that, in terms of methodology, I follow a rather
straightforward procedure: chapter 1 identifies a small and, hopefully, well-defined
syntactic class (BNBV inal), chapter 2 looks at the contexts in which members of the class
occur so as to identify some of the its semantic features, chapters 3 and 4 look at the
occurrence of the BNBV inal class in two distinct morphosyntactic environments, *mini-√
and *XP nam bi-√ respectively, in the hope that some form of semantic compositionality
can be identified in these environments, and chapter 5 formulates a diachronic hypothesis
as to how ergativity arises in Sumerian, resulting in the differentiation of locative-
terminative and ergative cases, both of which share the form *-e.
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