Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

attested in significant numbers prior to the Old Babylonian period. Only once these
genres surface in text-artifactual form, does the distributional category that I investigate
in this chapter appear in clear and robust fashion. But even if the lexemes that occur in
the class defined by the BNBV diagnostic differ in some respects, the form of the
syntactic constituents that seem to occur in BNBV constructions in the OB period can be
derived in a fairly transparent way from the form seen in the ED IIIb period. Whereas the
ED IIIb materials seem to suggest a syntactic structure such as
[[… PP Loc/Erg [(NP Bare) bi]-√], the BNBV inal construction seems to suggest a syntactic
ground plan such as the following: [… PP Loc/Erg [PP LocTerm NP Bare] bi]-√ with the inclusion
of the an additional PP LocTerm argument of the verb (the oblique object in the terminology
of Zólyomi [1999]).
Even given this relatively sketchy set of distributional facts, a preliminary
distributional template can be proposed:
(12) [ XP … [[ Direct speech Ø Ø bi 2]-du 11]]
(13) [ XP … [[PP Loc Ø Ø bi 2]-√]]
(14) [ XP … [PP Loc/Erg Ø [NP Bare] bi 2]-√]
(15) [ XP … [PP Loc/Erg [PP LocTerm [NP Bare]] bi 2]-√]
Although the series of phrase diagrams running from (12) through (15) is a fiction in that
they do not represent any single synchronic phase of the language, they are at least
partially representative of the overall syntactic pattern that I am attempting to justify in
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