Addenda to non-verbal clauses in Old Babylonian

This paper re-examines some issues related to non-verbal clauses in the letter corpus of Mesopotamian Old Babylonian. The various types of non-verbal clauses are classified as follows: 1. unipartite non-verbal clauses: the various sub-types (i.e. natural phenomena, existential and [non]referential) and the special environments and exponents typical of each sub-type are discussed; 2. bipartite non-verbal clauses: bipartites with a personal pronoun are formally distinguished from appositive syntagms of seemingly the same structure, the particle -ma is shown to signal contrastive focus in non-verbal clauses (as in verbal clauses), a few exponents are analysed as rheme markers (e.g. lū, the negative particle and, occasionally, -ma) and the order of elements in a non-verbal clause with an adverbial rheme is shown to be pertinent; 3. locative existentials are sharply distinguished from non-verbal clauses with an adverbial rheme and their special nature is discussed.