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

Historische fonologie en morfologie van het Indo-Europee

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

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