Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

Zólyomi’s description of possessor raising in Sumerian (1999, 231-237) or the use of
clausal possessive constructions for certain kinds of inalienable noun (see Nichols 1988
for orientation) should recognize that the low source applicative is also a kind of
possessor raising construction. In other words, the low source applicative takes a
possessive construction involving a head noun, such as panci-lul in (22), and a possessor
in the genitive case, such as Mary-ui in (22)—where only panci-lul, the direct object, has
a syntactic relation to the main verb—and changes it into a raised possessor construction
in which both the head noun, panci-lul in (21), and the raised possessor, Mary-hanthey
in (21), are arguments of the verb. It is only because of the fact that Mary-ui is not an
argument of the verb, whereas Mary-hanthey is, that we can speak of the construction in
(21) as a low source applicative construction, since one defining feature of an applicative
construction is that it takes a phrase that is not an argument of the verb and converts it
into a phrase that is an argument of the verb.
The parallel with the other types of applicative should, therefore, be fairly clear: the
high applicative in (20) removes the instrumental case-marking from an instrument,
inpeni, and indicates that it a core argument of the verb by adding a morpheme, *-ir-, to
the verb; the low goal applicative in (19) changes a benefactive prepositional phrase, for
Lou, into a bare noun, Lou, and incorporates the bare noun into the verb; likewise, the
low source applicative in (21) changes a genitive possessive construction into a clausal
possessive construction with a raised possessor and, in the process, makes the raised
possessor an argument of the verb (for further discussion of possessor raising and its
relation to the rise of ergative case-marking in Sumerian, see chapter 5).
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