Henry, Mark James (2013) the Syntax of Reduced Nominals in Akkadian. Phd Thesis. SOAS, University of London

Henry, Mark James (2013) The syntax of reduced nominals in Akkadian. PhD Thesis. SOAS, University of London http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/18561 Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non‐commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this thesis, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full thesis title", name of the School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination. THE SYNTAX OF REDUCED NOMINALS IN AKKADIAN MARK JAMES HENRY Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in Linguistics 2013 Department of Linguistics SOAS, University of London 1 ABSTRACT This thesis investigates within a generative framework a cluster of morphological and syntactic facts in the Old Babylonian variety of Akkadian, whose common property, despite many divergences, is the occurrence of structurally reduced nominal constituents. Akkadian nominals, whilst in their normal morphosyntactic form fairly rich both inflectionally and in their capacity to support complex nominal constituents, appear in various restricted syntactic contexts in reduced forms, entailing the loss of affixal expression of features (especially case, as well as gender and number), the barring of modifiers, as well as other restrictions. These phenomena may be divided into several major categories, one of which has clear parallels in well-studied Semitic languages (the nominal-internal ‘construct state’), and others which do not have such parallels, including nouns in the construct-state morphological form as heads of relative clauses and the ‘stative’ (a peculiar form of nominal predication). Each of these phenomena is described, investigated and analysed in successive chapters, both individually and in terms of their interrelations and differences, and their possible implications for various aspects of generative syntactic theory are explored. For example, the investigation of the Akkadian construct state construction has important implications for aspects of the general generative theory of these constructions; construct-headed relative clauses both for this and for the theory of headed relative clauses, especially for the ongoing debate concerning the internal/external status of the head and some of the fine properties of the ‘raising analysis’; the stative suggests the hitherto unrecognised existence of denominal incorporation to a verbal head producing a copula-like interpretation. This is the first extended generative study both of the Akkadian construct state and of the other phenomena mentioned above. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 5 Abbreviations 8 0 Introduction 10 1 Construct-Headed Relative Clauses 23 1.0 Introduction 23 1.1 Nominal State in Akkadian 25 1.2 Prior Work on Akkadian Construct-Headed Relative Clauses 27 1.3 Restrictions on the Structure of Construct-Headed Relative Clauses 30 1.4 The Internally-Headed Relative Clause Analysis 49 1.5 Construct-Headed Relative Clauses in Generative Perspective 55 1.6 Conclusion 89 2 Possessive Structures and the Construct State 92 2.0 Introduction 92 2.1 The Construct in the Generative Tradition 106 2.2 Akkadian and the Theory of the Construct State 138 3 The Stative 174 3.0 Introduction 174 3.1 Assyriological Views of the Stative 185 3.2 A Syntactic Analysis of the Stative 215 3.3 Conclusion 245 4 Conclusion 247 Bibliography 255 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project was crucially supported by a Doctoral Award from the AHRC. Without this none of the work in, on or related to this project would have been possible, and so they deserve heartfelt thanks. Peter Sells was the principal supervisor of the project for the first two years of its life. He was unfailingly supportive of me through my application, through topic- realignment and administrative travail, and his confidence in me above all is worthy of immense gratitude. Following Peter Sells’ departure from SOAS, Irina Nikolaeva kindly completed the task. I would also like to thank Andrew George and Peter Austin for their support as members of my supervisory team. I came to SOAS’s Linguistics department as a Masters student. The particularly pleasant group of fellow students I was privileged to encounter during this year and for some time after deserve special recognition here. Some of these people, especially those who like me continued on the academic road, suffered much greater problems subsequently than I did, and here I humbly submit both my gratitude for their friendship and my sadly ineffectual sympathy for various plights which wrongly or by chance came their way. I did not know all of the 2008-9 Linguistics intake at all well, especially in the parallel LDD programme (least of all the phantom person who occasionally spoke up on email lists but seemed to be devoid of any corporeal existence), but those I did know composed a group of fellow students one could not easily hope to better. From my undergraduate days, to Andrew George, Daniel Schwemer, and Franz van Koppen for teaching me Akkadian; to Roger Matthews for having been completely irrelevant to this dissertation but being probably the most pleasant archaeologist one could hope to meet; and to Assyriological historian Karen Radner for the good insight to criticise me for being too interested in languages. A very old acknowledgement is also due to Joe, Debbie, Samina and a few others for making those long-gone class days more pleasant. A tangential but substantial acknowledgement goes to Gillian Greenberg for a pleasant class in Syriac which indirectly led on toward the path to this project (though this was not my earliest 5 encounter with the language), and to its various participants, examples of those many pleasant souls one encounters briefly in the course of an educational career. To the organisers and participants of the EGG Summer Schools of 2010-12, I must offer my heartfelt thanks, though this gratitude does not, it must be said, extend to the Romanian fleas that were the one less than pleasant artefact of this experience. These events were undoubtedly vital to my general academic development as a linguist. There were too many particular people pleasantly encountered in the course of these events to thank individually here. To all the organisers and lecturers at these EGGs, of course, for much time and effort given for no additional remuneration at all. To Tom and Jess of UCL, especially for aiding me in the presumably unheard of honour of attaining joint fourth place in a pool tournament held between generative linguists in a Romanian basement (two years later, Patrick, a member of the ad hoc Anglophone group who provided pleasant company at EGG12 – also including Tanner, Debbie, and the aforementioned Jess – aided me in my abstract revenge as joint victor of that later year’s pool competition); and particularly to Michal Starke, Sandra Iulia-Ronai, and two other Romanians whose names I never learnt, with whom I shared a memorable return journey to Bucharest on what was termed the Eternal Train. An award for fortuitous organisation is due to a Canadian acquaintance who was instead driven to Bucharest by God. Among personal friends and relations, I must particularly single out my mother for her constant support and encouragement. To work in this way, for these purposes, on an extinct language is an odd experience, and to acknowledge one’s debt for one’s data is no straightforward matter, the attempt to formulate such an acknowledgement perhaps not even a sane ambition: one is acknowledging not the specific judgements given in response to specific requests by a few scattered speakers, but an entire dead society with all its history and woes and cares, of which anyone in the present, let alone the author, has only a very scant and uncertain knowledge. As one pages through modern publications, themselves the products of more than a century of painstaking work, in search of linguistic data, one cannot help but feel in this very distance and estrangement a ghostly kinship, especially when dealing not with texts of high literature but with 6 humdrum personal letters and other everyday material. It is at least undeniable that this project would not have been possible, not only without the aid and prior work of the entire tradition of Assyriological scholarship, but also without these lives and the spectres of them preserved in the documents that survive them. To these alien men and women from an alien time, I suppose I must offer some expression of this strange debt; to them I thus offer some amateurish imitation of their language, the last clause liberally adapting a real sentence I once ran across, buried somewhere in darkest AbB. ana awīlē ša Marduk uballiṭūšunūti qibī-ma umma MJH-ma ina ṭuppātim anniātim awīlūtī amrā 7 ABBREVIATIONS This list of abbreviations includes those which occur in the glosses and citations of examples, together with various others which occur in the text. It does not include the few bibliographical abbreviations used, mostly in example citations, which typically appear alongside author-date references (see pp. 19-21); the sole exception included here is CAD, which

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