Copular Clauses and Focus Marking in Sumerian

Gábor Zólyomi

Open Access Published by De Gruyter Open Poland 2014

Copular Clauses and Focus Marking in Sumerian

Gábor Zólyomi

https://doi.org/10.2478/9783110401707

Overview
Contents

About this book

This work is the first comprehensive description of Sumerian constructions involving a copula. Using around 400 fully glossed examples, it gives a thorough analysis of all uses of the copula, which is one of the least understood and most frequently misinterpreted and consequently mistranslated morphemes in Sumerian.
It starts with a concise introduction into the grammatical structure of Sumerian, followed by a study that is accessible to both linguists and sumerologists, as it applies the terminology of modern descriptive linguistics. It provides the oldest known and documented example of the path of grammaticalization that leads from a copula to a focus marker. It gives the description of Sumerian copular paratactic relative clauses, which make use of an otherwise only scarcely attested relativization strategy. At the end of the book, the reader will have a clear picture about the morphological and syntactic devices used to mark identificational, polarity and sentence focus in Sumerian, one of the oldest documented languages in the world.

Sumerian grammar, copular clauses, information structure.

Author / Editor information

Gábor Zólyomi, Associate Professor at the Department of Assyriology and Hebrew Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest

Reviews

"This book is an important piece of work for people working on the Sumerian language, as well as for general or historical linguists interested in the typology of copular clauses and in the grammaticalization processes that may be related to the copula or to focus marking in any language."
Veronika Hegedüs in: Acta Linguistica Hungarica 62/2015

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	VII
Abbreviations Publicly Available Download PDF	IX
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	XII
Introduction Publicly Available Download PDF	1
1 Sumerian in a Nutshell Publicly Available Download PDF	4
2 Non-verbal Predicates in Sumerian Publicly Available Download PDF	17
3 A Typology of Sumerian Copular Clauses Publicly Available Download PDF	27
4 Attributive Copular Biclausal Constructions Publicly Available Download PDF	56
5 Specificational Copular Biclausal Constructions Publicly Available Download PDF	101
6 Subordinate Clauses Followed by a Copula Publicly Available Download PDF	152
7 Summary and Outlook Publicly Available Download PDF	182
References Publicly Available Download PDF	186
Index of Quoted Texts Publicly Available Download PDF	193
Index of Subjects Publicly Available Download PDF	198

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Open Poland
Audience: Linguistics, Assyriology, Ancient Near Eastern studies
Pages
- Main content: 212
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 14
Keywords: Sumerian; copula; focus; information structure; copular clauses; grammaticalization; cuneiform languages

eBook

Published: September 5, 2014
ISBN: 9783110401707

Hardcover

Published: September 5, 2014
ISBN: 9783110401691