Akkadian Sentences about the Present Time (II/2)

762 Morphosyntax and Text Structure in Akkadianberg forthcoming 7.3 argues: “In terms of semantic transitivity, stativeshave ‘zero transitivity,’ since they do not indicate a change in the state ofthe world. Accordingly, they cannot have an agentive subject, since agentivityimplies a conscious volitional act on the part of the subject and istherefore only applicable to actions.” Binnick 1991:187, to whom K. refersat this juncture, indeed says: “States are largely involitional, involuntary.Therefore they cannot be agentive, and consequently any structurepresupposing agency, for example […] the imperative (be tall !) is excluded.”Yet, in Akkadian the SC can have an agentive grammatical subject,e. g. it is used within the prohibitive construction (and with the directionalventive!): ana eqlim šuāti mamman lā ¢e 4 -i-a-am ‘nobody has toapproach this field!’ (AbB 4, 125:14).An interim conclusion from this study, focused on the ways the SCand the Pres. of individual verbs are used in OB and OA, suggests thatthe SC is more unpredictable than GAG and subsequent grammatical researchhave it. According to GAG 126f., the only important restriction onthe formation of the SC is the atelic semantics of a given verb, which istrue in many cases (but not always, cf. the list of verbs in fn. 7). Kouwenbergforthcoming 7.3 claims (following GAG) that “the fientive verb itselfmust be telic in order to have a stative at all,” yet this claim is not sharpenough. Indeed, the criterion of (a)telicity may turn out to be not thatcrucial. 8 Now, let us recall the semantic taxonomies of verbs that are currentin typological studies (as described in Loesov 2005): very roughly,these taxonomies are based on the four Vendlerian classes (states, atelicprocesses, telic processes, punctual events), combined with the criteria ofagentivity and transitivity (the latter understood both syntactically andsemantically). If we then examine a given cross-linguistically identifiablesemantic group of Akkadian verbs, we will be unable to tell from theirprima facie semantic and syntactic properties whether their SC is productiveand whether it appears in our records at all, and if it does, what itmeans. By contrast, as regards the Pres. and Pret., we can safely assumetheir existence and predict their meanings for most dictionary items ofthe G-stem (the few conspicuous exceptions are well-known and enteredin textbooks and reference grammars of Akkadian). The t-Perf. is much8GAG 126f. does imply that telic verbs normally form the SC, but all threevon Soden’s examples are infelicitous, which is hardly incidental. Thus, tebi ‘istaufgestanden = ist auf ’ is exceptional (i. e., tebûm is a basic motion verb, yet its SCis quite rare), wa-´í-a-at (CH VIII rev.:7) is doubtless a predicative “participle,” erbet‘ist eingetreten = ist darin’ is also exceptional.