1.

Record Nr.

UNISA996308832603316

Autore

Zólyomi Gábor

Titolo

Copular clauses and focus marking in Sumerian / / Gábor Zólyomi ; managing editor, Katarzyna Grzegorek ; associate editor: Anna Borowska ; language editor, Allison Kirk

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Warsaw, [Poland] ; ; Berlin, [Germany] : , : De Gruyter Open, , 2014

©2014

ISBN

3-11-040170-3

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xii, 200 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Classificazione

EM 1850

Disciplina

499/.955

Soggetti

Sumerian language - Syntax

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 Sumerian in a Nutshell -- 2 Non-verbal Predicates in Sumerian -- 3 A Typology of Sumerian Copular Clauses -- 4 Attributive Copular Biclausal Constructions -- 5 Specificational Copular Biclausal Constructions -- 6 Subordinate Clauses Followed by a Copula -- 7 Summary and Outlook -- References -- Index of Quoted Texts -- Index of Subjects

Sommario/riassunto

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.