Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

Examples (8) and (9) obviously differ according the basic BNBV criteria, so in (9) the
nominal component of the compound verb bears a possessive pronoun and does not
immediately precede the verb. Both (8) and (9) are compound verbs in the general sense,
however, and they take the perceived object in an oblique case (the apparent absence of
oblique case on lu 2 izi.la 2 is only apparent, since both phonological and orthographic
principles often result in the non-appearance of certain postpositions in the writing
system, and it has been reconstructed in the gloss). With a handful of exceptions, the
nominal component of any particular BNBV compound verb never bears a possessive
pronoun or demonstrative clitic even in those cases where the verbal prefix is not the
*bi-√ prefix.
Example (11) differs from example (10) in that an allative [Alla] directional element
[ßi] 9 occurs in the verbal prefix even though an allative postpositional phrase does not
appear in the clause. Although older theories expected that dimensional infixes such as
[ßi] 9 would “agree” with postpositional phrases formed from an etymologically related
postposition, Gragg’s work has overturned this assumption (see section 1.3). I assume in
the following that, in the majority of cases, the dimensional infixes can be thought of as
the pronominal equivalent of the etymologically corresponding postpositional phrase. As
a rule, the *bi-√ prefix excludes such directional/pronominal elements—this is in fact the
intuition behind the most widely accepted reconstruction of the verbal prefix under the
OO hypothesis: namely, that the *bi-√ prefix is made up of [b] 5/6-[i] 10, excluding the
directional/pronominal elements (otherwise known as the dimensional infixes) in slots
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