The Grammar of Perspective.

• Author: Delnero, Paul
• Position: Book review

By C. E. Woods. Cuneiform Monographs, vol. 32. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Pp. xxiii + 348. $194.

This volume, which is a substantial revision of its author's 2001 dissertation, 'The Deictic Foundations of the Sumerian Language," is the first book-length treatment of the so-called "conjugation prefixes" in Sumerian to be published to date, and one of only a few detailed scholarly investigations of a specific grammatical aspect of Sumerian to appear in recent years. For both the interpretation it offers of the much disputed function of the verbal prefixes examined and its exemplary application of current linguistic method and theory, the book is a highly valuable contribution to the growing literature on Sumerian grammar. The persuasiveness of Woods' argumentation inspires confidence in the possibility of solving more of the remaining grammatical problems in Sumerian at a time when many scholars have dismissed Sumerian grammatical analysis as a futile pursuit, resigned to the pessimistic (and largely anecdotal) presumption that much of the language cannot and will never be understood.

Among the unresolved questions in Sumerian grammar, the function of the conjugation prefixes has been one of the most widely contested. The literature on this issue, which stretches back to the nineteenth century, has yielded a plethora of divergent theories, none of which has pushed the discussion any closer toward a consensus on how the prefixes are to be analyzed or understood. A question as basic as which verbal prefixes are to be classified as conjugation prefixes is one of the many for which there is little if any agreement. While it is generally assumed that mu-, ba-, and frequently also i- are prefixes of this type, some assign as many as four additional prefixes--which include different combinations of [bi.sub. 2] -, imma-, immi-, a(l)-, and/or /m/, among others--to the group. Since these prefixes are typically defined vis-a-vis the other prefixes of the same class, the differing views about which prefixes are conjugation prefixes have resulted in a multiplicity of conflicting interpretations of their function. A sense of the extent to which the proposed functions diverge can be obtained from the detailed survey in the introduction to Woods' book, which provides a chronological overview of the most influential of these theories. These range from the view that /mm-, ba-, and He- are essentially deictic elements indicating the position of the subject with...