Grammaticalization of a reciprocal pronoun in a diachronic typological perspective: evidence from Vedic and Indo-European

Historische fonologie en morfologie van het Indo-Europee

Skt. vṛdh2 'hurt, damage, cut'

The present paper deals with the origin of the late Sanskrit root vṛdh2 ‘hurt, cut’, which is explained as extracted from the compound vy-ṛdh2 ‘be deprived of smth., be precluded from smth., lose’, with the subsequent simplification of the difficult sequence vyṛ- --> vṛ-

Constraints on the causative derivation in early Vedic: Evidence for a diachronic typology of transitivity

This paper demonstrates the relevance of the semantic approach to transitivity (going back to Hopper and Thompson 1980) for the analysis of Vedic causative verbs. It argues that in terms of this approach it is possible to explain a number of constraints on causative derivation (which cannot be explained in terms of the traditional, syntactic, definition) and to offer a unified account of the semantics of these verbs. It also briefly discusses some theoretical implications of this analysis of causative verbs in Vedic for a diachronic typology of transitivity

Language vs. grammatical tradition in Ancient India: how real was Pāṇinian Sanskrit? Evidence from the history of late Sanskrit passives and pseudo-passives

by Pāṇinian grammarians and the forms and constructions that are actually attested in the Vedic corpus (a part of which is traditionally believed to underlie Pāṇinian grammar). Concentrating on one particular aspect of the Old Indian verbal system, viz. the morphology and syntax of present formations with the suffix ‑ya-, I will provide a few examples of such discrepancy. I will argue that the most plausible explanation of this mismatch can be found in the peculiar sociolinguistic situation in Ancient India: a number of linguistic phenomena described by grammarians did not appear in Vedic texts but existed within the semi-colloquial scholarly discourse of the learned community of Sanskrit scholars (comparable to Latin scholarly discourse in Medieval Europe). Some of these phenomena may result from the influence of Middle Indic dialects spoken by Ancient Indian scholars, thus representing syntactic and morphological calques from their native dialects onto the Sanskrit grammatical system

The labile syntactic type in a diachronic perspective: the case of Vedic

Ancient Indo-European verbal syntax, as attested in early Vedic Sanskrit, exhibits numerous examples of the labile syntactic pattern: several verbal forms can show valence alternation with no formal change in the verb; cf. pres. svadate 'he makes sweet' / 'he is sweet'; perf. vavrdhuH ~ 'they have grown' (intr.) / 'they have increased' (tr.). It is argued that the labile patterning of the Vedic verb, however common it may appear, is mostly of a secondary character. There are a limited number of reasons which give rise to labile syntax: (i) the polyfunctionality of the middle inflection (which can be used to mark the anticausative, passive and reflexive functions, on the one hand, and the self-beneficent meaning of the transitive forms, on the other); (ii) the homonymy of some middle participles "shared" by passive (medio-passive aorist, stative) and nonpassive formations; (iii) the syntactic reanalysis of intransitive constructions with the accusative of parameter/scope (content accusative) as transitive-causative. As to the perfect, it could probably be employed both intransitively and transitively already in Proto-Indo-European, although the intransitive usages were prevalent. In the historical period the newly-built perfect middle forms have largely taken over the intransitive function, but active perfects are still quite common in the (more archaic) intransitive usages in early Vedic

Grammaticalization of reciprocal pronouns in Indo-Aryan: evidence from Sanskrit and Indo-European for a diachronic typology of reciprocal constructions

This paper focuses on the evolution of the Old Indo-Aryan reciprocal pronoun anyo’nya- as well as some related forms, tracing its grammaticalization from the early Vedic period onwards until the beginning of the Middle Indic period. On the basis of a comparison of the history of this formation with similar processes documented in some other Indo-European branches (Greek, Slavic etc.), I uncover some basic mechanisms and scenarios of the evolution of reciprocal constructions attested in the history of Indo-Aryan languages in a diachronic typological context, offering a number of typological generalizations on the diachrony of reciprocals

Drifting between passive and anticausative: reply to replies

A