Gábor Zólyomi Copular Clauses and Focus Marking in Sumerian sales series_De Gruyter Studium Gábor Zólyomi Copular Clauses and Focus Marking in Sumerian Managing Editor: Katarzyna Grzegorek Associate Editor: Anna Borowska Language Editor: Allison Kirk Published by De Gruyter Open Ltd, Warsaw/Berlin This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license, which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Copyright © 2014 Gábor Zólyomi ISBN: 978-3-11-040169-1 e-ISBN: 978-3-11-040170-7 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. Managing Editor: Katarzyna Grzegorek Associate Editor: Anna Borowska Language Editor: Allison Kirk www.degruyteropen.com Cover illustration: © Thinkstock, Clay bricks carrying the inscriptions of E-ana-tum, ruler of Lagash in the 24th c. BC. To Joachim Krecher, my teacher, colleague, and friend, who has taught me the value of disagreeing. Contents Introduction 1 1 Sumerian in a Nutshell 4 1.1 Introduction 4 1.2 The Sumerian Nominal and Verbal Template 7 2 Non-verbal Predicates in Sumerian 17 2.1 Introduction 17 2.2 Copular Clauses: the Most Important Characteristics 17 2.3 Copula Dropping: Non-verbal Predicates without a Copula 22 3 A Typology of Sumerian Copular Clauses 27 3.1 Introduction 27 3.2 The Classification of Copular Clauses in Linguistics 27 3.3 Copular Clauses in Sumerian 30 3.4 The Typology of Copular Clauses in Practice 52 3.5 Summary and Conclusions 54 4 Attributive Copular Biclausal Constructions 56 4.1 Introduction 56 4.2 Attributive CBCs and the Paratactic Relativization Strategy 57 4.3 Attributive CBCs and Appositions 69 4.4 Attributive CBCs in Which the CC Functions as Reason or Concessive Clause 81 4.5 Attributive CBCs Containing CCs with Left-dislocated Possessors 88 4.6 The Copula Functioning as Standard Marker 94 5 Specificational Copular Biclausal Constructions 101 5.1 Introduction 101 5.2 The Origin of the Sumerian Cleft Construction 102 5.3 Copula or Focus Marker? 112 6 Subordinate Clauses Followed by a Copula 152 6.1 Introduction 152 6.2 Thetic Sentences in Sumerian 154 6.3 Sentences with Polarity Focus 169 6.4 Summary and Conclusions 181 7 Summary and Outlook 182 References 186 Index of Quoted Texts 193 Index of Subjects 198 Abbreviations in the morphological glossings ~pl reduplication expressing verbal plurality ~pf reduplication expressing present-future tense 1sg first person singular 2sg second person singular 3nh third person non-human 3pl third person plural human 3sg third person singular human a agent (subject of a transitive verb) abl ablative case-marker or prefix abs absolutive case-marker acc accusative case-marker adv adverbiative anc anchor ant prefix of anteriority app appositive com comitative case-marker or prefix coor coordinator prefix cop copula cvn compound verb nominal element dat dative case-marker or prefix dem demonstrative pronoun DN divine name erg ergative case-marker fin finite-marker prefix gen genitive case-marker GN geographical name h human l1 locative1 case-marker or prefix l2 locative2 case-marker or prefix l3 locative3 case-marker or prefix l4 the archaic locative enclitic -/ne/ m masculine mid middle prefix mod modal prefix neg negative prefix nh non-human nom nominative p patient (object of a transitive verb) pf present-future, or the marker of the present-future pl plural pr pronoun PN personal name poss possessive enclitic pt preterit, or the marker of the preterit rdp reduplication s subject (subject of an intransitive verb) sub subordinator suffix stm standard marker syn syncopated form of a verbal prefix tl tenseless term terminative case-marker or prefix TN temple name ven ventive prefix Other abbreviations AAICAB 1/2 Grégoire (1996-200) Aleppo Touzalin (1982) AO Museum siglum of the Louvre, Paris (Antiquités orientales) AOAT Alter Orient und Altest Testament (series) AoF Altorientalische Forschungen (journal) ARET Archivi reali di Ebla. Testi (series) Ashm. Museum siglum of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford ASJ Acta Sumerologica (journal) AuOr Aula Orientalis (journal) BM Museum siglum of the British Museum, London BPOA Biblioteca del Proximo Oriente Antiguo (series) CBS Museum siglum of the University Museum, Philadelphia (Catalogue of the Babylonian Section) CC copular clause CDLI Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (http://cdli.ucla.edu) COP copula CT Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum (series) CTNMC Jacobsen (1939) CUSAS Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology (series) Cyl. Cylinder DP Allotte de la Fuÿe (1908-1920) ETCSL Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://etcsl.orinst.ox. ac.uk) ETCSRI Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions (http://oracc. museum.upenn.edu/etcsri) FaoS Freiburger altorientalische Studien (series) Fs. Kienast Selz (2003) Fs. Owen Kleinerman & Sasson (2010) Fs. Pettinato Waetzoldt (2004) Fs. Sigrist Michalowski (2008) HS Tablet siglum of the Hilprecht Collection, Jena IP interrogative pronoun ISET 1 Çiğ & Kızılyay & Kramer (1969) JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies (journal) LEM Michalowski (1993) MSL Materialien zum sumerischen Lexikon / Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon (series) MVN Materiali per il vocabulario neosumerico (series) NATN Owen (1982) NBGT Neo-Babylonian Grammatical Texts NG Falkeinstein (1956b) Ni Museum siglum of the Archaeological Museum, Istanbul (Nippur) NRVN 1 Çiğ & Kızılyay (1965) OB Old Babylonian Ontario 2 Sigrist (1995) OSP 2 Westenholz (1987) PC predicate complement RIME 1 Frayne (2007) RIME 2 Frayne (1993) RIME 3/1 Edzard (1997) RIME 3/2 Frayne (1997) RTC Thureau-Dangin (1903) SAT Sumerian Archival Texts (series) SNAT Gomi & Sato (1990) SRU Edzard (1968) TCS 1 Sollberger (1966) TRU Legrain (1912) UET Ur Excavations, Texts (series) VS Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmäler der (Königlichen) Museen zu Berlin (series) ZA Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie (journal) Acknowledgments The largest part of this work was written while I was the holder of a János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences between 2008 and 2011. I had, however, started the systematic collection of linguistic evidence on the Sume- rian copula within the framework of a 12 month long Return Fellowship of the Alex- ander von Humboldt-Foundation starting in September 2004. I thank Walther Salla- berger for his support in my application for this fellowship. The study of copular clauses in Sumerian royal inscriptions, an essential corpus for any work on Sumerian grammar, was part of the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumer- ian Royals Inscriptions project. This project was funded by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) between 2008.10.01–2013.06.30 (project no. K75104). The last chapters of this work were finished while I was the holder of a senior fel- lowship at the Central European University’s Institute of Advanced Studies between October 2012 and June 2013. The reader will notice that my work takes issue with Bram Jagersma’s recent description of Sumerian (2010) on a number of points. This happens because Jag- ersma’s work is the only modern descriptive grammar of Sumerian that discusses the copular clauses of Sumerian in depth. I am most grateful to Bram as his grammar provides a solid basis from which any question of Sumerian grammar can now be dis- cussed in a serious way, and it has also taken the burden off me to explain everything about copular clauses from scratch. Knowing him, I am sure that he will not mind my disagreements. I thank Katalin É. Kiss and Márta Peredy for their valuable comments on my ideas about the Sumerian copular clause. I am grateful for Szilvia Jáka-Sövegjártó who read several parts and versions of this work and kindly helped me in accessing linguistic and assyriological literature not available in Hungary. I would like to thank to Fru- zsina Csorba whose BA thesis helped me a lot to understand how constituent ques- tions in Sumerian work. I am most grateful to László Török, my colleague and friend, whose unwavering faith in me was a driving force to bring this work to completion. I am thankful for the support of my family, especially of my wife Ildikó, whose life has been influenced so much in the last five years by my obsession with the Sumerian copula. Introduction This work has grown out of my interest in understanding certain Sumerian sentences in which the copula appeared to function as a focus marker (see Chapter 5 below). The phenomenon of a focus marker being cognate with a copula is cross-linguistically well-attested, and the source of such markers is frequently a cleft-like construction.1 It seemed therefore an interesting question as to whether a similar development could also be reconstructed for Sumerian. My initial research focused on two areas of Sumerian grammar, neither of which had previously been the subject of systematic investigation: the typology of copular clauses in terms of their semantic types and information structure (see now Chapter 3 below); and the function of certain copular clauses which occurred as parts of biclausal constructions (see Chapters 4 and 5 below). After a while it became clear that my research on copular clauses may lead much further than anticipated: the analysis of copular clauses together with that of biclausal constructions can provide a key to understanding how identificational focus was marked in Sumerian. Almost nothing was previously known about this area of Sumerian grammar.2 One would look in vain for a section on information structure in Sumerian in the exist- ing grammars of the language (e.g., Thomsen 1984; Edzard 2003). The only exception is Jagersma’s grammar, which offers a short subsection on “The copula in highlighting constructions” (2010, pp.