This work is the first comprehensive description of Sumerian constructions involving a copula.
Using around 400 fully glossed examples it gives a thorough analysis of all uses of the copula
which is one of the least understood and most frequently misinterpreted and consequently
mistranslated morphemes in Sumerian. It starts with a concise introduction into the grammatical
structure of Sumerian followed by a study that is accessible to both linguists and
sumerologists as it applies the terminology of modern descriptive linguistics. It provides the
oldest known and documented example of the path of grammaticalization that leads from a copula
to a focus marker. It gives the description of Sumerian copular paratactic relative clauses
which make use of an otherwise only scarcely attested relativization strategy. At the end of
the book the reader will have a clear picture about the morphological and syntactic devices
used to mark identificational polarity and sentence focus in Sumerian one of the oldest
documented languages in the world.
