=== Typological structure ===

One major branch of linguistic investigation that has been particularly useful in the study of languages recovered from text-artifactual sources such as the cuneiform record is language typology. Recent work on language typology largely stems a seminal paper by [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Greenberg|Joseph Greenberg]], "Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements," (Greenberg 1963). Since Greenberg's description of language typology relies on implicational universals (if a language exhibit some phenomena A, then it must also exhibit some phenomena B), it is particularly useful in testing present-day analyses of ancient languages for which no native speakers remain. Although language typology has played a leading and explicit role in work by G. Steiner (1990; 1994) and, more recently, Jarle Ebeling ([[http://email.eva.mpg.de/~cschmidt/SWL1/handouts/Ebeling.pdf|2004]]), it most important consequences have come to reside in nearly all of the most important work on Sumerian grammar in the past few decades such as Yoshikawa's work on [[grammatical aspect]] and Michalowski's description of split [[ergativity]].

== Basic word order in Sumerian ==
Sumerian is a verb-final language (sometimes described as SOV in the older literature) in which the verb rarely if ever appears anywhere in a clause other than the final position.

== Bibliography ==
  *Greenberg, Joseph. 1963. Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In //Universals of Language//, pp. 73–113. Cambridge: MIT Press.
  *Steiner, G. 1990. Sumerisch und Elamisch: Typologische Parallelem. //Acta Sumerologica// 12: 143-176.
  *Steiner, G. 1994. Die sumerischen Verbalpräfixe mu= und e= im sprachtypologischen Vergleich. In ZDMG Suppl. 10, pp. 32-48