Participles in Rigvedic Sanskrit by Lowe, John J.;

The Syntax and Semantics of Adjectival Verb Forms

Series: Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics;

GET 10% OFF
The discount is only available for 'Alert of Favourite Topics' newsletter recipients.

Publisher's listprice GBP 137.50
The price is estimated because at the time of ordering we do not know what conversion rates will apply to HUF / product currency when the book arrives. In case HUF is weaker, the price increases slightly, in case HUF is stronger, the price goes lower slightly.

65 690 Ft (62 562 Ft + 5% VAT)
Discount 10% (cc. 6 569 Ft off)
Discounted price 59 121 Ft (56 306 Ft + 5% VAT)

65 690 Ft

Availability

printed on demand

Product details:

Publisher OUP Oxford
Date of Publication 23 April 2015

ISBN 9780198701361
Binding Hardback
No. of pages434 pages
Size 239x157x31 mm
Weight 780 g
Language English

Short description:

This book examines the syntax and semantics of several thousand examples of tense-aspect stem participles in the Rigveda, one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. The author applies formal linguistic analysis to the data and produces a comprehensive formal model of how these participles are used.

Long description:

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.

There can be no doubt that this ambitious and higly successful work represents a milestone in the study of Rigvedic syntax and semantics.