Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

etween (i) a construction in which a bare noun phrase occurs immediately to the left of
the verb and a locative or ergative postpositional phrase occurs immediately to the left of
the bare nominal *PP Loc/Erg NP Bare bi-√, and (ii) a construction in which a locative
postpositional phrase appears immediately to the left of the verb and the category of the
constituent to the left of the locative postpositional phrase is entirely unconstrained *XP
PP Loc bi-√. 10 Although the number of tokens of BNBV constructions in the ED IIIb corpus
are roughly equivalent for the two distributional classes, I would like to focus on the
distribution that shows greater formal complexity, the DP Loc/Erg DP Bare *bi-√ class, if for no
other reason than the fact that the Old Babylonian materials that show the same
distribution of preceding elements form a relatively coherent semantic class. Thus,
anticipating my results somewhat, I would like to limit my attention to BNBV predicates
of the form *DP Loc/Erg DP Bare *bi-√ in which the nominal component of the compound verb
is an inalienable body-part noun.
The *DP Loc/Erg DP Bare *bi-√ distributional class is very poorly represented in the Old
Akkadian materials, if present at all, and the predominant feature of the OAkk exemplars
of *bi-√ prefix verbs is that co-occurring NPs tend to lack any overt case morphology
whatsoever. I take this as an underspecification perhaps under the influence of the
emergent, non-native Sargonic scribal elites, but do not pursue the matter further here.
The Ur III materials are also quite limited in that administrative and legal genres
dominate the attested materials. There are a few examples of predicates that meet one of
10 Note that the highly attenuated nature of verbal prefixes in the ED IIIb period may call into question some of these
identifications, but the juxtaposition of the two syntactic patterns, [NP-e NP-Ø bi-√] vs. [XP NP-a bi-√], seems to
represent a rather clear pattern.
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