Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

1
The BNBV inal distributional class
Sumerian frequently makes use of a syntactic construction in which a noun phrase occurs
immediately before the verb and seems to form a lexical or idiomatic unit with the verbal
root. These noun/verb pairs are known as compound verbs and are often treated as
distinct lexemes in lexicographical work such as the example in (1).
(1) Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, l. 554 5
en aratta ki .ke 4 gig.e igi bi 2.in.du 8
en aratta-k-e gig-e igi [b] 5-[i] 10-[n] 11-√du
lord GN-Gen-Erg wheat-LocTerm eye Inan-Dir-ProAnim-close.up
The lord of Aratta saw the wheat
5 Transcriptions of languages written in cuneiform and, in particular, transcriptions of Sumerian make use of a plethora
of conventions, only a few of which will be outlined here: (a) graphemes are separated by periods if they belong to the
same word or appear in superscript if they are purely semantic elements and lack phonological representation, (b) the
numbers in subscript following some graphemes code correspondences between certain orthographies and phonological
forms, but in themselves they do not represent any phonological diacritic. Elsewhere in this thesis, where necessary, the
subdivisions in the verbal prefix signaled by the use of square brackets such as -[b] 5- are based on the segmentation and
numbering in use at the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary (Karahashi, personal communication), but for the sake of
exposition the segmentation implicit in the work of Krecher, Jagersma, and Zólyomi (Zólyomi 1999) is used in this
section. See the section on conventions and abbreviations in the front matter for the abbreviations in the glosses.
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