The stylistic role of the anticipatory genitive construction in Sumerian literature

The anticipatory genitive construction is undoubtedly an original Sumerian morpho-syntactical construction, derived from the standard genitive construction as a stylistic tool in the literature. The anticipatory genitive serves as a distinct tool for singularizing and emphasizing the governed noun, by relocating it at the beginning of the genitive construction. One of the most significant stylistic functions of the anticipatory genitive is the singularization of one ore more key words throughout the literary composition by relocating it at the beginning of the sentence. An examination of the Sumerian literary texts indicates that this stylistic-grammatical phenomenon is quite wide spread. A further investigation reveals that in many important Sumerian literary works, the anticipatory genitive constitutes only one stylistc-grammatical tool for the singularization of key words. In such compositions, the key word very often appears at the beginning of the sentence, whether its role is that of a subject, object or governed noun, regardless of the standard Sumerian word order.