Search results for "Vedic Sanskrit"
showing 10 items of 10 documents
Continuous and discontinuous nominal expressions in flexible (or “free”) word order languages: Patterns and correlates
2020
AbstractThis study explores continuous and discontinuous word order patterns of multi-word nominal expressions in flexible word order languages (traditionally referred to as “free word order” or “non-configurational” languages). Besides describing syntagmatic patterns, this paper seeks to identify any functional or other correlates that can be associated with different word orders. The languages under investigation are a number of Australian languages as well as Vedic Sanskrit, all of which have long been known for their syntagmatic flexibility. With respect to continuous order, evidence from several of these languages suggests that default ordering is primarily governed by functional templ…
Spatio-temporal deixis and cognitive models in early Indo-European
2018
AbstractThis paper is a comparative study based on the linguistic evidence in Vedic Sanskrit and Homeric Greek, aimed at reconstructing the space-time cognitive models used in the Proto-Indo-European language in a diachronic perspective. While it has been widely recognized that ancient Indo-European languages construed earlier (and past) events as in front of later ones, as predicted in the Time-Reference-Point mapping, it is less clear how in the same languages the passage took place from this ‘archaic’ Time-RP model or non-deictic sequence, in which future events are behind or follow the past ones in a temporal sequence, to the more recent ‘post-archaic’ Ego-RP model that is found only fr…
Towards a Reconstruction of Indo-European Culture: Semantic Functions of IE *men-
2003
The aim of this paper is to recover the semantic values involved in IE *men- in order to reconstruct some cognitive process modalities in regard to "Indo-European ideology" (Campanile 1992). After focusing on the apparent semantic split noticeable between Homeric Greek and Vedic in the uses derived from *men-, I argue for the presence of striking parallel paths using the methods of textual comparison. Then, the role of lexical nucleus' polysemy in originating the linguistic change is highlighted, without disregarding an Indo-European typological perspective within the realm of the so-called "basic lexicon" to which the root at issue belongs.
INHERENT TELICITY AND PROTO- INDO-EUROPEAN VERBAL PARADIGMS
2016
In recent aspectual classi}cations telicity is described as a compositional syntactic property, and verbs are analyzed as complex structures made up of completely neutral roots. However, semantic changes due to both derivational processes and dierent syntactic contexts could have obscured the relationship between root lexical aspect and verb morphological paradigms. The purpose of this paper is to show that telicity can be considered as an inherent lexical property: the co-occurrence in a sentence with arguments, adverbials or speci}c pragmatic contexts which can (de)telicize the event described by a verb has consequences at syntactic level, whereas the prototypical aspect of the root is p…
Root lexical features and inflectional marking of tense in Proto-Indo-European
2009
This paper examines early inflectional morphology related to the tense-aspect system of Proto-Indo-European. It will be argued that historical linguistics can shed light on the long-standing debate over the emergence of tense-aspect morphology in language acquisition. The dispute over this issue is well-known; it has been pursued mostly by scholars following various general linguistic approaches, from typology to acquisition, but also by historical linguists and Indo-Europeanists, who have long debated about the precedence of aspect or tense from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. However, so far Indo-Europeanists have rarely confronted their results in a successful way with re…
The Homeric compound Ὑπερίων and the sun in the Indo-European culture
2017
This paper aims at reconstructing the semantic meaning of Homeric Ὑπερίων, the epithet of the sun, whose etymology is still not clear. After presenting the modern interpretations, which describe it as an adjective in the comparative form derived from the adverbial particle ὑπέρ ‘up, above’, the ancient grammarians’ hypothesis on Ὑπερίων as a compound is tested, taking into consideration the textual analysis of those discourse contexts in which the terms for sun are used in archaic Greek and Vedic Sanskrit in comparative perspective. In particular, the co-occurrence with the motion verb go, i.e. εἶμι and i from the same IE root *h1ey-, in the Homeric poems and in the Rigveda respectively, mi…
Towards a reconstruction of Indo-European culture: semantic functions of IE *men-
2002
Indo-European language reconstruction has allowed us to advance some hypotheses with regard to possible reconstructing cultural contents of what has been defined “Indo-European ideology” (Campanile 1992). The method of textual comparison, which compares no longer and not merely single lexical items or single syntactic constructions, but the whole literary systems too, is able to bring out linguistic and extra-linguistic reference contexts. The interest in reconstructing the Indo-European “basic lexicon” is renewed in the light of recent typological criteria of root classification (according to their active or stative meaning): the focus today is on drawing up the so-called “global etymologi…
On syntactic diagnostics as tests for telicity in ancient Indo-European languages. Evidence from Vedic and Greek
2017
The aim of this paper is to assay the reliability of completive and durative adverbials as linguistic tests for telicity in a historical perspective. Until now such tests have been applied only to contemporary languages, which provide both written and spoken corpora. However, if the compatibility with for/in-adverbials is a reliable test, it should function not only crosslinguistically, but also with ancient and reconstructed languages. I will use digital corpora of Vedic Sanskrit and Homeric Greek texts to explore the compatibility of temporal expressions with a selected sample of verbs that derive from a previous Indo-European common stage.
Deissi spaziale e verbi di movimento in vedico
2016
This study is part of a broader research project on temporal and spatial deixis in the Proto-Indo-European language. Specifically, the aim of this paper is to investigate the basic motion verbs go and come in Vedic. The deictic component of PATH has often been considered as inherent to the lexical semantics of these verbs cross-linguistically. However, I will show that Vedic i “go”, gā “go; come; step” and gam “go; come” express a deictically-neutral meaning of ‘moving along a path’, which is not characterized with regard to both MANNER and PATH. Data suggest that these verbs can take on a deictic interpretation by cooccurring with specific particles, adverbs, demonstratives, and personal p…
Proto-Indo-European verbal suppletion and emerging paradigms
2008
The existence of suppletion in a Proto-Indo-European language is still a question of debate (García Ramón 2002). While the evidence for such a phenomenon has been widely recognized within the verbal system of most Indo-European languages, some scholars describe it as a recent monoglot development which characterizes the history of each single language without involving a previous common stage. According to Strunk (1977), the hypothesis of a PIE suppletive paradigm based on the alternation of verbal roots such as *es- and *bhu- “be”, or *ei-/i- and *gwa-/ gwem - “go”, must be ruled out because it violates the so-called criterium-b, i.e. complementary distribution of the forms involved in a s…