This book examines the syntax and semantics of tense-aspect stem participles in the Ṛgveda. The Ṛgveda is an ancient collection of sacred Indian hymns, written in the Vedic Sanskrit language, and is one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. The author applies formal linguistic analysis, within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), to the complex and often controversial data, to produce a comprehensive formal model of how participles are used. This analysis makes it possible to reassess and recategorize the forms concerned, defining certain stems and subcategori ... More

This book examines the syntax and semantics of tense-aspect stem participles in the Ṛgveda. The Ṛgveda is an ancient collection of sacred Indian hymns, written in the Vedic Sanskrit language, and is one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. The author applies formal linguistic analysis, within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), to the complex and often controversial data, to produce a comprehensive formal model of how participles are used. This analysis makes it possible to reassess and recategorize the forms concerned, defining certain stems and subcategories as marginal within, or even outside, the synchronic category of participle on the basis of their syntactic and semantic properties. In a wider perspective, the author reassesses participles as a category within the wider verbal and nominal systems of the language, in the context of their Proto-Indo-European prehistory, and from the perspective of participle typology. It is argued that tense-aspect stem participles should be analysed as adjectival verbs, not verbal adjectives, but that even so participles are not fully dependent on corresponding finite verb forms. Rather, they constitute a coherent but independent subcategory within the verbal system of the language. These and many other of his conclusions either directly challenge or radically revise received opinion and recent work.