This book examines several thousand examples of tense-aspect stem participles in the Rigveda, and the passages in which they appear, in terms of both their syntax and semantics. The Rigveda is an ancient collection of sacred Indian hymns, written in Vedic Sanskrit, and is one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. It is also a poetic text in which deliberate obscurity is the governing aesthetic and in which the rules of language are pushed to their limits in order to produce the ideal poetic expression. Many Vedic sentences are of controversial, disputed meaning, and Vedic scholarship is thus fraught with controversy. John J. Lowe applies formal linguistic analysis to the data and produces a comprehensive formal model of how participles are used. The author uses his findings to recategorize the data, by defining certain stems and stem-types as outside the synchronic category of participle on the basis of their syntactic and semantic properties. He suggests alternative sources for these forms and considers the linguistic processes that transformed old participles into non-participial entities. In his conclusion he reassesses the category of participles within the verbal and nominal systems, looks at their prehistory in Proto-Indo-European, and describes their universal, typological characteristics. Among his conclusions are that tense-aspect-stem participles have the technical properties of adjectival verbs, not verbal adjectives, and that such participles are not fully dependent on corresponding finite verbal forms. That is, a perfect participle, for example, need not share all the semantic and functional features of the finite perfect forms built to the same stem. These and many other conclusions drawn either directly challenge or radically revise received opinion and recent work.

This book explores the wealth of evidence from early Indo-Aryan for the existence of transitive nouns and adjectives, a rare linguistic phenomenon which, according to some categorizations of word classes, should not occur. John Lowe shows that most transitive nouns and adjectives attested in early Indo-Aryan cannot be analysed as a type of non-finite verb category, but must be acknowledged as a distinct constructional type. The volume provides a detailed introduction to transitivity (verbal and adpositional), the categories of agent and action noun, and to early Indo-Aryan. Four periods of early Indo-Aryan are selected for study: Rigvedic Sanskrit, the earliest Indo-Aryan; Vedic Prose, a slightly later form of Sanskrit; Epic Sanskrit, a form of Sanskrit close to the standardized 'Classical' Sanskrit; and Pali, the early Middle Indo-Aryan language of the Buddhist scriptures. John Lowe shows that while each linguistic stage is different, there are shared features of transitive nouns and adjectives which apply throughout the history of early Indo-Aryan. The data is set in the wider historical context, from Proto-Indo-European to Modern Indo-Aryan, and a formal linguistic analysis of transitive nouns and adjectives is provided in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar.

The field of South Asian linguistics has undergone considerable growth and advancement in recent years, as a wider and more diverse range of languages have become subject to serious linguistic study, and as advancements in theoretical linguistics are applied to the rich linguistic data of South Asia. In this growth and diversity, it can be difficult to retain a broad grasp on the current state of the art, and to maintain a sense of the underlying unity of the field. This volume brings together twenty articles by leading scholars in South Asian linguistics, which showcase the cutting-edge research currently being undertaken in the field, and offer the reader a comprehensive introduction to the state of the art in South Asian linguistics. The contributions to the volume focus primarily on syntax and semantics, but also include important contributions on morphological and phonological questions. The contributions also cover a wide range of languages, from well-studied Indo-Aryan languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Bangla and Panjabi, through Dravidian languages to endangered and understudied Tibeto-Burman languages. This collection is a must-read for all scholars interested in current trends and advancements in South Asian linguistics.

This book presents the most comprehensive coverage of the field of Indo-European Linguistics in a century, focusing on the entire Indo-European family and treating each major branch and most minor languages. The collaborative work of 120 scholars from 22 countries, Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics combines the exhaustive coverage of an encyclopedia with the in-depth treatment of individual monographic studies.

The book addresses some raging questions in linguistics today: What kind of variation do typologically related languages display? Do we expect to find the same variation in genealogically unrelated languages spoken in the same area? What makes dialects different? The current book answers these questions using data from languages spoken in the Indian subcontinent—an area known for its linguistic richness and diversity. Each chapter in the book presents a wealth of data collected through extensive fieldwork or controlled experimental setups. The chapters examine macro-variation in relative clauses, word order and negation found among Austro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman languages. It also investigates meso-level variation among related Eastern Indo-Aryan languages and intra-language and dialectal changes. It encourages scholars to probe deep into the mechanisms that underlie the immense intra- and inter-language variation in the area. It serves as a resource book for postgraduate and research scholars of linguistic typology, theoretical syntax, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and for scholars interested in South Asian languages.

While linguistic theory is in continual flux as progress is made in our ability to understand the structure and function of language, one constant has always been the central role of the word. On looking into words is a wide-ranging volume spanning current research into word-based morphology, morphosyntax, the phonology-morphology interface, and related areas of theoretical and empirical linguistics. The 26 papers that constitute this volume extend morphological and grammatical theory to signed as well as spoken language, to diachronic as well as synchronic evidence, and to birdsong as well as human language.

Uses an explicit formal framework to explore and model cross-linguistic variation, in constructions where a noun modifies another noun.