Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
University of California, Los Angeles
610 Charles E. Young Dr.
3135 Mira Hershey Hall
Box 151105
Los Angeles, CA 90095
310-825-9222

cale@ucla.edu

Research interests

• Sumerian morphosyntax and semantics (definiteness, specificity, intensional predication and semantic incorporation, applicative and double object constructions)

• Semiotics of de novo script invention and elaboration (script origins, early syllabaries, orthographically mediated poetics, comparisons between Mesopotamian and East Asian scribalism and literacy)

• Economic and legal processes and documentation in the Ur III and Old Babylonian periods

• Peripheral Akkadian, the Amarna Letters and the development of diplomacy in the Late Bronze Age

Employment

Sept 2004 to present: Lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA.

Education

2004: PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (Assyriology) at UCLA. Dissertation: "In the Eye of the Beholder: Quantificational, pragmatic and aspectual features of the *bi- verbal prefix in Sumerian (Download a PDF copy here)"

2000: MA in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (Assyriology) at UCLA. Thesis: "Inalienability, antipassivization and headward migration in Sumerian"

1994: MA in Religious Studies from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago

1993: BA in Religious Studies from the University of California at Davis

Publications

In preparation

Unaccusativity and the double object construction in Sumerian (expected completion in the summer of 2008)

In press

Decomposing the DP in Sumerian: Definiteness, specificity and the BNBV diagnostic (to appear in Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes)

2008

Corpus-driven models of lexicography and Mesopotamian cultural heritage preservation at CDLI. In R. Biggs, J. Myers and M. Roth, eds., Proceedings of the 51st Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, pp. 69-74. SAOC 62. Chicago: Oriental Institute.

2007

Review of The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process, ed. Stephen Houston. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 17(2): 298-300.

2006

Internally Headed Relative Clauses in Akkadian: Identifying Weak Quantification in the Construct State. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 57: 85-98.

Review of Sargonic Akkadian: A Historical and Comparative Study of the Syllabic Texts by Rebecca Hasselbach. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz (2005). Review of Biblical Literature.

The Ur III Tablets in the Valdosta State University Archives. Cuneiform Digital Library Journal 2006:2. (Download a PDF copy here)

2004

In the Eye of the Beholder: Quantificational, pragmatic and aspectual features of the bi- verbal prefix in Sumerian. PhD dissertation, UCLA. UMI.

Two Ur III Tablets from the Tulare County Library. Cuneiform Digital Library Bulletin 2004:2. (Download a PDF copy here)

2000

Evidence of antipassivization in Sumerian The Bulletin of the International Institute for Linguistic Sciences Kyoto Sangyo University 21: 205-240.

Talks

2008

Mirativity in Sumerian
(American Oriental Society, Chicago, March 14, 2008)

2007

The kennings in Gilgamesh's rejection of Inanna and Amorite cultural identity
(American Oriental Society, San Antonio, March 17, 2007)

2006

Contrastive focus, negation and the ambiguity of kur
(American Oriental Society, Seattle, March 18, 2006)

Low applicatives and the mapping hypothesis in Sumerian (talk/handout)
(Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Albuquerque, January 7, 2006)

2005

New digital tools for Mesopotamian cultural heritage preservation at CDLI (slides) (talk)
(51st Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Chicago, July 20, 2005)

Internally headed relative clauses in Akkadian: Identifying Weak Quantification
in the Construct State
(American Oriental Society, Philadelphia, March 18, 2005)

2004

Babel, the critique of hubris, and the Late Old Babylonian Lexical List Tradition
(Society of Biblical Literature, San Antonio, November 21, 2004)

Diagnosing presupposition in Sumerian
(Sprache Aegyptologie Roundtable, Basel, April 23, 2004)

Decomposing lexical aspect in Sumerian (handout)
(American Oriental Society, San Diego, March 13, 2004)

2003

Sound/Image: The multimodal poetic structure of Bird and Fish 102-117
(American Oriental Society, Nashville, April 4, 2003)

2002

Complex graphemes in the proto-cuneiform corpus and the problem of phonological reconstruction (slides)
(48^e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Leiden, July 2, 2002)

The invention of writing in Mesopotamia
(Andrews University, October 21, 2002)

2001

Detransitivization in Sumerian, co-authored with Wakaha Mori
(42nd Sumerology Workshop, Tokyo, Japan, March 27, 2001)

2000

The verbal infix /-ni-/ in the Sumerian of the Old Babylonian Period: mediopassivization and pragmatic constraints on its interpretation
(41st Sumerology Workshop, Kyoto, Japan, August 31, 2000)

Medium as trope: on the poetics of "The debate between Bird and Fish"
(7th West Asian Linguistics Meeting, Kyoto, Japan, July 1, 2000)

1999

Evidence of antipassivization in Sumerian
(40th Sumerology Workshop, Tokyo, Japan, December 23, 1999)

Global case-marking in Sumerian: /mu-/, /ba-/, and /i-/
(6th West Asian Linguistics Meeting, Kyoto, Japan, December 4, 1999)

Last modified: March 30, 2008