Despite numerous studies on Sumerian inscriptions and literature, there has been only very few attempts to examine the syntax of Old Sumerian from a generative grammar point of view.
The Sumerian language was spoken for at least a thousand years as a vernacular, and it continued to be used for two more millennia as the language of art, religious cult, royal dedications and legal proceedings. Any language is bound to change drastically over such a long span. To remain consistent and to avoid dealing with too much diachronic change, I look only at a limited period of Sumerian, between the fifth dynasty of Lagash and the third dynasty of Ur, roughly between 2400 BCE and 1900 BCE (Before the Common Era). In this respect, I follow the work of two of the most important contemporary scholars of the Sumerian language, A. Jagersma (2010) and G. Zólyomi (2017).
In this work, I make a tentative sketch of the Sumerian syntax with a cartographic eye. I do not try to encompass all the possible syntactic structures in the existing Sumerian corpus, but I concentrate on the most striking part of this language, its verbal domain. Obviously, to understand the verbal phrase (VP), one must look at other parts of the clause as well, but I do so only in as much at it is indispensable for the understanding of the VP.
The three main questions I try to address are:
1. Which are the syntactic positions of the constituent DPs – subject and object – in the Sumerian clause? Are these positions inside or outside the verbal domain?
2. How can we explain the particular arrangement of affixes in the verbal domain? In other words, which are the grammatical roles of the affixed morphemes?
3. How can we explain the aspect controlled split ergativity observed in the Sumerian corpus?
I organised the work in 5 sections:
Section 1 is a short summary of the history of the Sumerian language, or, more precisely, of what we know about it. It also has a succinct account of the cuneiform script, the oldest writing system that we know of.
Section 2 is a very short description of the Sumerian grammar. I include this section because Sumerian is rarely studied in linguist programs in universities and therefore it may be completely unknown to the reader. But keep in mind that this section is mainly a way to point to the excellent grammars published by Jagersma (2010), Foxvog (2016), Zólyomi (2017) and others.
Section 3 is an attempt to list some of the basic tools of generative grammar that I use in my reasoning. While most generative linguists are not aware of the particularities of Sumerian and may appreciate Section 2, most Sumerologists are not aware of generative linguistic basic concepts, and Section 3 is a way to point to these tools and provide some references.
Section 4 is a consideration of how the word order – in particular the head-final characteristics of Sumerian – and the directionality of the syntactic process are fundamental when trying to understand its cartographic structure. In this section, I provide a justification of the template structure I will use to explain my answers to the three questions mentioned above.
Finally, in Section 5 I propose answers to these questions.
