G. Zólyomi(1)
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Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
Department of Assyriology and Hebrew Studies
Email: zolyomi.gabor@btk.elte.hu
Cite as: Zólyomi, G. 2020: Paratactic relative clauses in Sumerian. Hungarian Assyriological Review 1: 9–19.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52093/hara-202001-00001-000
Open Access
Abstract
Using the interpretation and analysis of the passage Ur-Namma 28 1:10-13 as starting point, this paper argues that copular clauses in Sumerian may function as paratactic relative clauses in biclausal constructions. It also demonstrates that the choice that which participant of the copular clause will function as head is determined not by the syntactic but by the pragmatic function of the participants. In the concluding part, the paper contends that the grammatical construction used in the frequently discussed passage E-ana-tum 5 5:10–17 is the same as that of Ur-Namma 28 1:10-13. It shows that the oddity of the E-ana-tum passage is due to the phenomenon that the name E-ana-tum is used once as an expression referring to a person, the ruler of Lagaš, and once as an expression referring to his name.
Keywords: Sumerian grammar, copular clauses, left-dislocation, paratactic relative clauses, royal inscriptions
Copyright and acknowledgements
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data availability. The author confirms that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article.
Disclosure statement. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding statement. The author received no financial support for the research and the publication of this article.
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