Internally-Headed Relative Clauses in Akkadian: Identifying Weak Quantification in the Construct State

Abstract

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Depersonalized Case Histories in the Babylonian Therapeutic Compendia

“…[Section 17] If someone has captured a fleeing slave, male or female, in the countryside and takes him or her back to the master, the master of the slave will have to give the person 2 22 There are significant grammatical issues that I am passing over here in near silence, notably that the rescript makes use of a construct relative construction in which a non-specific or indefinite noun is modified by a relative clause; see generally Johnson 2004. Samsu-iluna's statement is also a performative speech act, calling into existence the new statute, which presumably complicates the grammatical analysis of the passage.…”

Adjectival ša syntagms and adjectives in Old Babylonian

“…In doing so, he dismisses important synchronic facts basic to Akkadian (and indeed Semitic) syntax. Johnson (2005) is an attempt to show that Akkadian possesses what is termed``internally headed relative clauses''. This phenomenon was first described in the 1970s with regard to certain nominalized clauses in native American languages, interpreted as relative clauses.…”