Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

1.1 Directive case and the oblique object hypothesis
Sumerian morphosyntax has traditionally been thought of in terms of agreement between
nominal case-endings or postpositions and elements of the verbal prefix with relatively
little consideration of any kind of external evidence or motivation for such agreement
besides the phonological form of the agreeing elements themselves. The paradigms
generated by this traditional practice have been subjected to increasingly sophisticated
elucidation and testing in recent years, but the basic premise remains unchanged. In
particular, models in which subcategorization of the verb replaces verbal agreement as in
the head-marking, head-final type have not, as a rule, been investigated in any detail.
Therefore I use the word agreement in the following account in a pretheoretical sense to
mean simply regular co-occurrence without taking any position as to whether it is true
agreement or subcategorization of the verb with a corresponding nominal. Regardless of
theoretical presuppositions, an interesting contrast can be drawn between the two case-
marking subsystems that involve agreement with dative and locative case-marked nouns:
the indirect object [IO] subsystem as opposed to the oblique object [OO] subsystem. In
the following account I attempt to follow the model of directive case-marking and OO
proposed by Zólyomi (1999) without attempting to take into consideration differences
between Zólyomi’s work and that of Jagersma, which is largely unpublished. The views
adhered to by Zólyomi and Jagersma both reflect a line of thought that begins with work
by Krecher (1985). I would also like to emphasize that the morphological segmentations
in this section attempt to represent the hypothesis advanced in recent years by Zólyomi
and Jagersma—they do not represent my own understanding of Sumerian morphological
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