This thesis examines the inventory of morphemes Sumerian utilizes to
denote modal notions on the verb. Sumerian is an agglutinative
linguistic isolate that was spoken in southern Mesopotamia from at least
the fourth millennium BCE to sometime early in the second millennium
BCE. With respect to its morphology, the Sumerian language utilizes a
set of affixes that can occupy certain slots in the agglutinative verbal
prefix chain to code modality – a notional category that expresses a
speaker’s stance on utterances relative to reality and unreality.
Understanding the ways modal notions are coded in any language is
crucial as they are linguistic means to express high degrees of nuance.
As such, the study of modality in ancient languages such as Sumerian
will pave the way for an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the
texts, peoples, languages, and cultures that are millennia removed from
our own.This study is a corpus-based inquiry that follows the
guidelines of Functional Discourse Grammar and implements an
onomasiological methodology. In CHAPTER ONE, I provide an overview of
previous Sumerological scholarship and a general sketch of this
dissertation’s method, theory, and layout. CHAPTER TWO includes an
overview of modality as a linguistic category and the basics of its
expression in Sumerian. CHAPTER THREE is the first argumentative
chapter. In this chapter, I cover how all epistemic modal notions are
marked morphologically on the verb. The ways in which all deontic modal
notions are marked morphologically on the verb are outlined in CHAPTER
FOUR. The various morphological manifestations of evidential modality on
Sumerian verbs are covered in CHAPTER FIVE. All modal phenomena that
were unable to be included in a dedicated content chapter are discussed
in
6
CHAPTER SIX. In CHAPTER SEVEN, I organize all my findings by form, not
function, to help scholars in search of a more traditional presentation
of data. CHAPTER EIGHT includes my concluding remarks. APPENDICES
outlining the corpora and remaining uncited Asseveratives, an INDEX of
cited Sumerian verbs, and a standard BIBLIOGRAPHY conclude the
dissertation.
Degree Type
Ph.D.
Content Type
Dissertation
Publication Date
2023-08
Language
en
Record Created
2023-08-23
No comments:
Post a Comment