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.

Thetics and Categoricals do not belong to the categories of German grammar. Thetics were introduced in logic as impersonal and broad focus constructions. They left profound and extensive traces in the logic of the late 19th century. For the class of thetic propositions, the criterion of textual exclusion plays the major role, i.e. the absence of any common grounds and of any anaphorism and background. In the foreground are sentences with sub­ject inversion, subject suppression and detopicalization. These and only these are suitable for text begin­nings, jokes, stage advertisements and solipsistic exclamatives, thus speech acts without com­mu­nicative goals – free expressives in the true sense of the word. The contribu­tions in this volume not only guide the reader through the history of philosophical logic and distributions of impersonals in contrast to Kantian categorical sentences, but also the correspondences in Japanese and Chinese which, in contrast to German and English, sport specific morphological markers for thetics as opposed to categoricals.

The Ancient Near East provides a particularly striking example for the dynamics of knowledge transfer throughout space and time. The civilizations that emerged here, at the dawn of history, attest to continuous processes of exchange, adaption, and negotiation, to the emergence of content and its reconfiguration, to diffusion, disappearance and resurgence of themes, concepts, topics and ideas. In the late fourth millennium the creation and implementation of supraregional notational systems in southern Mesopotamia triggers a cognitive revolution: within a few centuries the use of writing becomes a dominant cultural technique and over the subsequent millennia the technique of wedge-writing spreads throughout southwest Asia. Numerous indigenous cuneiform subcultures came into being in a wide variety of times and places, but these distinct instantiations were held together (and preserved the possibility of common legibility) through shared practices of teaching and learning, a common core of textual materials and, not least, a systematic instrumentarium for representing speech and notation. This repertoire is part of each of these streams of tradition, which characterise the cuneiform cultures as a whole. In light of the centuries of tradition, the great effort that has gone into its construction and maintenance as well as the preservation of original linguistic materials and their translation into more familiar languages, the validity of this scientific tradition, broadly conceived, cannot be disputed. Still, even if the historical processes of transmission within the cuneiform world and the difficulties of translating cuneiform sources into non-cuneiform traditions prevented a general and far-reaching mobilisation of the cuneiform sources as vehicles for scientific reflection, these same factors also ensured its continued survival in Mesopotamia and Syria for not centuries, but rather millennia. One of the most important components of this process was the awareness of practitioners about language, its role for and its impact on the generation of knowledge, and specifically about linguistic patterns. Among the literally innumerable textual artefacts from the ancient Near East, there are some that both explicitly and implicitly encode traces of this distinctively linguistic awareness. It was in pursuit of these traces of (meta)linguistic awareness that the participants in this volume came together.

This textbook provides an introduction to the grammar of Sumerian, one of the oldest documented languages in the world. It not only synthesizes the results of recent scholarship but introduces original insights on many important questions. The book is designed to appeal to readers of all backgrounds, including those with no prior background in Sumerian or cuneiform writing.It is written for undergraduate students and structured for a semester-long course: the order of the topics is determined by didactic considerations, with the focus on syntactic analysis and evidence. It explains the functioning of Sumerian grammar in 16 lessons, illustrated with more than 500 fully glossed examples. Each lesson ends with a series of tasks; a solution key to selected exercises can be found at the end of the volume. Above all, this is the first Sumerian textbook that introduces and utilizes the online assyriological resources available on the internet. An Introduction to the Grammar of Sumerian has been written on the assumption that after decades of grammatical research it has become possible now to teach a general framework of Sumerian grammar that may function as the basis of further, more intensive and elaborate studies.

Not all sentences encode their subjects in the same way. Some languages overtly mark some subjects depending on certain features of the subject argument or the sentence in which the subject figures. This is known as Differential Subject Marking (DSM). Containing illuminating discussions of DSM from languages all over the world, this book shows that DSM is often the result of interactions between conflicting constraints on language use.

Introduction to Sumerian Grammar

The book is dedicated to linguistic morphology and it contains a sketch of a complete morphological theory, centered around a discussion of fundamental concepts such as morph vs. morpheme, inflectional category, voice, grammatical case, agreement vs. government, suppletion, relationships between linguistic signs, etc.: the hottest issues in modern linguistics! The book introduces rigorous and clear concepts necessary to describe morphological phenomena of natural languages. Among other things, it offers logical calculi of possible grammemes in a given category. The presentation is developed in a typological perspective, so that linguistic data from a large variety of languages are described and analyzed (about 100 typologically very different languages). The main method is deductive: the concepts proposed in Aspects of the Theory of Morphology are based on a small set of indefinibilia and each concept is defined in terms of these indefinibilia and/or other concepts defined previously; as a result, logical calculi can be constructed (similar to Mendeleev's Periodical Table of Elements in chemistry). Then the concept is applied to the actual linguistic data to demonstrate its validity and advantages. Thus, Aspects of the Theory of Morphology combines metalinguistic endeavor (a system of concepts for morphology) with typological and descriptive orientation. It reaches out to all students of language, including the border fields and applications.

Linguistic typology identifies both how languages vary and what they all have in common. This Handbook provides a state-of-the art survey of the aims and methods of linguistic typology, and the conclusions we can draw from them. Part I covers phonological typology, morphological typology, sociolinguistic typology and the relationships between typology, historical linguistics and grammaticalization. It also addresses typological features of mixed languages, creole languages, sign languages and secret languages. Part II features contributions on the typology of morphological processes, noun categorization devices, negation, frustrative modality, logophoricity, switch reference and motion events. Finally, Part III focuses on typological profiles of the mainland South Asia area, Australia, Quechuan and Aymaran, Eskimo-Aleut, Iroquoian, the Kampa subgroup of Arawak, Omotic, Semitic, Dravidian, the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian and the Awuyu-Ndumut family (in West Papua). Uniting the expertise of a stellar selection of scholars, this Handbook highlights linguistic typology as a major discipline within the field of linguistics.

The so-called Sumerian conjugation prefixes are the most poorly understood and perplexing elements of Sumerian verbal morphology. Approaching the problem from a functional-typological perspective and basing the analysis upon semantics, Professor Woods argues that these elements, in their primary function, constitute a system of grammatical voice, in which the active voice is set against the middle voice. The latter is represented by heavy and light markers that differ with respect to focus and emphasis. As a system of grammatical voice, the conjugation prefixes provided Sumerian speakers with a linguistic means of altering the perspective from which events may be viewed, giving speakers a series of options for better approximating in language the infinitely graded spectrum of human conceptualization and experience.

This book is intended as counter-evidence to the perception of Linguistics as the domain of dusty schoolroom grammar, where proponents of one theoretical orientation or the other spend their brief breaks in the playground bashing the others over the head with their favorite abstractions. The discipline may appear to outsiders as fragmented and, worse still, lacking in relevance to the real world outside its gates. The purpose is to show that Linguistics, in all its varied branches, can be entertaining as well as thought-provoking, and that its domain is indeed a coherent one despite all the internecine squabbling. The subject is introduced in an unconventional way as a kind of fable with an historical moral that professional linguists, as well as students, should enjoy as a commentary on the state of the discipline today.