Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

[ ] 7, [ ] 8 and [ ] 9. In other words, the occurrence of the *bi-√ prefix in the BNBV
diagnostic necessarily excludes the other dimensional infixes which I would argue are
associated with pronominalization of postpositional phrases and, as a result, the
definiteness of the noun phrase that bears the postposition (see Gragg 1973a). All in all,
the BNBV diagnostic systematically excludes from the BNBV set the most obvious cases
of definite nouns that immediately precede the verb: namely, independent nominal
phrases bearing possessive or demonstrative suffixes as well as the dimensional infixes.
The reason for these restrictions on the definiteness of a phrase that appears immediately
before the verb is that one of the primary goals of this investigation is to isolate
constructions that include indefinite nouns and to track the morphosyntactic
consequences of their indefiniteness.
If one turns to the corpora being assembled by CDLI, several preliminary
distributional questions should probably be addressed before looking at the semantic
class defined by the diagnostic: (a) what kinds of constituent can occur immediately
before *bi-√ verbs in general (what, in other words, is the BNBV class a subset of), (b)
what kinds of constituents occur immediately before the nominal component of a BNBV
compound verb in which the bare noun is alienable, and (c) what kinds of constituents
occur immediately before the nominal component of a BNBV construction in which the
bare nominal is inalienable. The following table presupposes a number of interpretative
principles that need to be made clear: type refers to a distinct lexemic set of exemplars
(which due to the extremely formulaic character of most early documents represents a
single exemplar in certain respects, e.g., ßu.a bi 2.gi 4 with 142 tokens of the type, nearly
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