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

In a pair of recently published articles, Deutscher has argued that the early history of the relative clause in Akkadian is one fraught with dysfunction (2001, 2002). Old Akkadian relative clauses are described as "demonstrably dysfunctional" (2001: 405), "dysfunctional and maladaptive" (2002: 86, 95), and "an unstable way-station in the process of the emergence of a new relative clause structure in the language" (2002: 86-87). I suspect that Deutscher's choice of pejorative terminology is meant more as an entertaining rhetorical device rather than carefully considered statement of linguistic theory, but, if nothing else, it has inspired me to attempt a redescription of the relative construction in Akkadian along lines similar to those enunciated by Deutscher. For a number of reasons that I adduce throughout the paper, I hypothesize that the relative clause in Old Akkadian generally as well as the construct relative clause in Old Babylonian is what is known as an internally headed relative clause (hereafter IHRC). To be more specific, I will argue that the "unstable way-station" in Old Akkadian is perceived as "dysfunctional" because both the relative formed via the placement of the head of the relative in the construct state as well as those formed by means of the determinative-relative pronoun are IHRCs, but that, by the time of the Old Babylonian period, the relative clause formed with the determinative-relative pronoun had been re-