Volume 8, Issue 1-2

It is often said, independently of any linguistic evidence, that the refusal of the redactors of the Rigveda text to allow sandhi between the second and third eight-syllable verses (pādas) of the three-line Rigvedic gāyatrī stanza is based on their parallel convention in the cases of the four-line triṣṭubh and anuṣṭubh stanzas, where the first two lines predominantly serve as an independent discourse unit (distich) relative to the last two. This paper attempts to provide independent linguistic evidence for the redactors’ treatment of the gāyatrī line by examining the syntactic and rhetorical structures of the first 300 gāyatrī stanzas in the Rigveda. The results show that nearly 60% of these show a clear syntactic and/or rhetorical break at the end of the second verse, whereas fewer than 19% show such a boundary following the first verse. While this does not prove that the redactors’ procedure was based on syntactic-rhetorical structure alone, it is maintained that the redactors could not have been unaware of the preponderance of a linguistic break following the second verse of the gāyatrī and that, even if they were influenced by their treatment of the distich boundary in four-line stanzas, their procedure was not simply a matter of analogical extension independent of linguistic considerations.

The present study provides a survey of the semantics of depictive (in a broad sense, including circumstantials) adjectival compounds in Vedic Sanskrit. Following the typology of depictive constructions developed by Himmelmann & Schultze-Berndt (2005), we structure our classification along the semantic fields that such expressions tend to occur in. Our results show that in Vedic, the use of depictive adjectival compounds spans (almost) the whole gamut of functions reported for depictives in cross-linguistic studies. In Vedic, depictive compounds rank on a par with other strategies of non-finite event elaboration such as participles, verbal adjectives, and action nouns.

This paper constitutes the first account of the tense morphology of Mewahang, a hitherto undescribed Trans-Himalayan language (Upper Arun, Kiranti). The paper discusses non-past marking in the western dialect of Mewahang, presenting and illustrating its different allomorphs and relating them historically by internal reconstruction. Furthermore, comparative notes on non-past marking in the other Upper Arun languages, Eastern Mewahang, Yamphu and Lohorung, are added. It is shown that a non-past morpheme * -yuk can tentatively be reconstructed for Proto-Upper Arun, but that at the same time the Upper Arun languages show a strong tendency to quickly grammaticalise new non-past morphology, and that the reconstructed morpheme is only retained in traces in Eastern Mewahang and Yamphu. The reconstruction of *- yuk for Proto-Upper Arun is the first empirical substantiation of the Upper Arun branch of Kiranti, since it probably constitutes a diagnostic innovation of this group of languages.

This paper presents an extensive discussion on the functions of the -êy suffix in Hyow, a Southeastern Kuki-Chin (henceforth, KC) language spoken by approximately four thousand people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. The attested use of the -êy suffix in Hyow is of interest because of its use in two opposite syntactic structures. Although the straightforward function of the -êy suffix resembles that of middle voice, its other use in prototypical transitive clauses makes it difficult to assign a category to the suffix in question. This paper deals with this anomaly in the functional domains of the -êy suffix in Hyow with empirical data and makes suggestions of a category to be assigned to this suffix.