In the eye of the beholder: Quantificational, pragmatic and aspectual features of the *bi-√ verbal prefix in Sumerian

Traditional models of Sumerian grammar suggest that the primary function of the *bi-√ verbal prefix is as a marker of locative agreement of one kind or another, but these models have, as a rule, described the *bi-√ prefix in purely morphological terms and failed to elucidate syntactic relations that hold between the *bi-√ prefix and other elements of the clauses in which it occurs. One of the consequences of the traditional avoidance of syntactic questions in the study of Sumerian is that almost nothing is known about several grammatical phenomena that appear to be coded through syntactic means such as definiteness, existential quantification, and the pragmatic opposition between topic and focus. This dissertation investigates the *bi-√ prefix as part of a larger effort to identify some of these basic morphosyntactic oppositions in the text-artifactual record of the Sumerian materials that originate from Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2000--1600 BCE) in Mesopotamia. I argue that the occurrence of a bare inalienable noun immediately to the left of a *bi-√ prefix verb forms a distinctive morphosyntactic construction which can be identified on the basis of both morphosyntactic and semantic critieria as a low source applicative construction.; The identification of this subset of the occurrences of the *bi-√ prefix as a low source applicative construction has broad implications for other parts of Sumerian grammar, in particular, the development of ergativity in the language. The low source applicative construction is limited to a group of verbs that includes verbs of perception and adversity and can be juxtaposed to a type of causative construction in which a bare alienable noun occurs immediately to the left of the *bi-√ prefix. This opposition stems from the fact that, in the low source applicative construction, the ergative noun phrase is the possessor of the inalienable noun rather than the agent of the clause. In order to elucidate several possible correlations between the clausal possessive constructions underlying the use of the low source applicative and the development of ergativity, several other issues are also dealt with in considerable detail in the balance of the dissertation: the use of possessive pronominal suffixes to code definiteness and topicalization as well as the role of indefiniteness and the definiteness effect in verbs of perception, head-internal relative clauses and contrastive focus constructions.