Historical Source of Ergativity in Indo-Iranian

EVIDENTIAL, RAISED POSSESSOR, AND THE

HISTORICAL SOURCE OF THE ERGATIVE

CONSTRUCTION IN INDO-IRANIAN1

By THEODORA BYNON

(Received 10 October 2003)

ABSTRACT

This paper argues (i) that the source of the ergativeconstruction of the transitive verb in Indic and Iranianlanguages was anticausative but not passive as has widelybeen assumed, (ii) that it functioned as a modally markedevidential which indicated that the event in question wasinferred or reported rather than directly witnessed, and (iii)that the agent was by origin a genitive-marked adnominalpossessor raised out of its noun phrase and later reanalysed asthe syntactic subject, its uniform instrumental-marking inSanskrit being an innovation. In view of the fact that thepossessive modifier precedes its head this analysis can accountnaturally for the position of the transitive agent at thebeginning of the clause, preceding the object. It is, finally,suggested that the construction originated with non-agentiveintransitive verbs and that it spread to transitives through theintermediary of ergative (ambitransitive) verbs which canhave both intransitive-spontaneous and transitive-causativeforms, a hypothesis which creates a diachronic link betweenlexical and structural ergativity.

1 The present analysis is a radical revision of a paper presented at the meeting ofthe Philological Society on 20 February 1998, and to some degree also of a lecturegiven on 29 January 1999 at the University of Konstanz, on the occasion of anAkademische Feierstunde in honour of the late Professor Manfred Faust. I amgrateful to Matt Shibatani, Werner Abraham, and Leonid Kulikov for helpfulcomments on an earlier draft. I also thank the editors and two reviewers who read thepaper for the TPS. Any faults that remain are of course my own responsibility.

Transactions of the Philological Society Volume 103:1 (2005) 1–72

� The Philological Society 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

1. SPLIT CLAUSE-MARKING

In a substantial number of languages — far too many for it to becoincidental — nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutiveclause marking co-occur, producing a split marking system. Splitsystems in which the distribution of nominative-accusative andergative-absolutive marking is governed by verbal tense/aspect arefound not only in Indic and Iranian but also in Armenian, inCaucasian languages, in certain Tibetan dialects, in Mayanlanguages, and in Samoan and certain other Austronesian lan-guages (Trask 1979, Dixon 1994:99ff., Milner 1973, Abraham1996). In all of these it is the transitive clause in the perfective aspect(or the past tense) which attracts the ergative-absolutive type ofalignment while all other clauses have nominative-accusativealignment. The reverse distribution, although theoretically conceiv-able, is unattested in the languages of the world.

Prototypically, nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutivesystems differ in the way the three universal syntactic-semanticrelations generally labelled S, A and O are treated in some partor parts of the grammar. The first of these, S, stands for thesingle actant and syntactic subject of the intransitive verb. A andO stand for the two actants of the transitive verb, A for theprototypical agent (and noun phrases patterning like it) and Ofor the prototypical object or patient. The nominative-accusativetype treats alike, and as morphologically unmarked, S and A,which are in the nominative whereas O is (in the prototype)overtly marked by means of the accusative case. The ergative-absolutive type, by contrast, treats alike and as unmarked S andO, which are in the absolutive case while A has distinctivemarking by means of the ergative case. (The third, active-inactive type, divides intransitive clauses into active and inactiveones, the subject of the former being marked like A, that of thelatter like O.) Verb agreement is in both systems withthe unmarked actant (that is to say, with S and A in thenominative-accusative type and with S and O in the ergative-absolutive type), irrespective of syntactic relations. The case-marking patterns of these two systems may be represented as inTable 1 (Dixon 1994:9):

TRANSACTIONS OF THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY 103, 20052

Given the wide distribution of split marking systems it isperhaps surprising to find that their origins are in major respectsstill unresolved. Even in the Indo-Iranian family of Indo-European, which has a documented language history of somethree thousand years, the issue is in fact still controversial. It ishowever undisputed that it is the ergative marking pattern whichhere represents the innovation. The historical derivation of theergative construction to be developed in this paper is designed toaccount for two essential facts hitherto unclarified, (i) the clause-initial position of the agent and (ii) the grammatical function ofthe source construction in early Indic and, ultimately, Proto-Indo-Iranian.

1.1. The ergative construction in present-day Indic and Iranianlanguages

The split marking system found in many present-day Indic (Indo-Aryan) and Iranian languages is illustrated in (1) from Hindi(Indic) and (2) from Pashto (Iranian). It will be seen that in theergative constructions at (1d) and (2d) the transitive agent (A)has an overt marker, in Hindi the postposition ne, in Pashto theoblique case (both labelled ‘ergative’) and that the verb agreeswith O. In the imperfective aspect on the other hand thetransitive agent is morphologically unmarked, having the sameform as the subject (S) of the intransitive verb, and the verbagrees with A. Neither Hindi2 nor, with the exception of first and

Table 1

NOMINATIVE-ACCUSATIVE TYPE ERGATIVE-ABSOLUTIVE TYPE

NOMINATIVE CASE

A ERGATIVE CASE

SABSOLUTIVE CASE

ACCUSATIVE CASE O

no

2 I am excluding here the clause type in which the definite animate object,especially if human, is overtly marked by the postposition ko in both imperfectiveand perfective. In the transitive perfective the verb here has the neutral (3SG.M) form.

BYNON – THE ERGATIVE CONSTRUCTION IN INDO-IRANIAN 3

second person pronouns, Pashto have an accusative marker sothat the transitive object (O) is unmarked also in the imperfec-tive. (I have left the morphologically unmarked noun phrasesunglossed for case.)

(1) a. Intransitive imperfectivel er:ka sota hai.boy sleep.IPFV.M. be.2/3SG.PRES‘The boy sleeps.’l er:kı� sotı� hai.girl sleep.IPFV.F be.2/3SG.PRES‘The girl sleeps.’

b. Intransitive perfectivel er:ka soya.boy sleep.PFV.M‘The boy slept.’l er:kı� soı�.girl sleep.PFV.F‘The girl slept.’

c. Transitive imperfectivel er:ka kitab p er:h r eha hai.boy book read PROG be.2/3SG.PRES‘The boy is reading a book.’l er:kı� kitab p er:h r ehı� hai.girl book read PROG be.2/3SG.PRES‘The girl is reading a book.’

d. Transitive perfectivel er:ke-ne kitab p er:hı�.boy.OBI-ERG book read.PFV.M‘The boy read a book.’l er:kı� ne kitab p er:hı�.girl ERG book read.PFV.F‘The girl read a book.’ (Y.Kachru, p.c.)

(2) a. Intransitive imperfectivebaz alw ezi.falcon fly.3SG.PRES‘The falcon flies/is flying.’


b. Intransitive perfectivebaz walwato.falcon fly.3SG.PAST.PFV‘The falcon flew away.’

c. Transitive imperfectivesar:e baz alwazawi.man falcon fly.CAUS.3SG.PRES‘The man is causing the falcon to fly.’

d. Transitive perfectivesar: i baz walwazaw elo.man.ERG falcon fly.CAUS.3SG.M.PAST.PFV‘The man caused the falcon to fly.’ (Khattak 1988:72)3

Syntactically, however, even in the transitive past perfective it isthe agent which exhibits such prototypical subject properties asclause-initial position and deletion under co-reference in con-joined clauses, as is shown below in examples (3) from Hindi and(4) from Pashto. In both languages an intransitive clause isfollowed by a transitive clause. In Hindi the first predicate is inthe form of the conjunctive participle whose empty subject iscontrolled by the subject of the main clause. In Pashto the agentis in the absolutive case, as required by the intransitive verbalthough the deleted agent of the transitive verb does require aclitic. In both languages the construction is therefore ergativeonly morphologically.

(3) andar j�akar gop�al-ne cit: t:hı� likhı�.inside go.CONJ.PRT Gopal-ERG letter write.PAST.PFV.F‘Going inside, Gopal wrote a letter.’ (Masica 1991:342)

(4) Z elme kor-ta lar:o aw lobe yeZalme.ABS house-to go.3SG.M.PAST.PFV and games 3SGw ekr:e.play.3PL.F.PAST.PFV‘Zalme went home and played games.’ (Khattak 1988:77)

3 I wish to thank Dr. Khalid Khan Khattak for permission to draw on data fromhis thesis.


In Indo-Iranian the historical origin of the split marking pattern isto some degree transparent for, in the Old Indic and Old Iranianancestors of the ergative construction, the predicate is a pastparticiple employed as a finite verb. In the case of a transitive verbbase this participle is ‘patient-oriented’ (Hock 1986), having, aselsewhere in Indo-European, O as its subject (cf. English The letteris written). The fact that it is the O constituent which bears thenominative case and determines the inflected form of the pastparticiple (which agrees with it in gender, number and case) is thuswell understood. What has not been resolved is the historical originof the agent. The traditional solution, elaborated in recent work, layin interpreting the construction as a passive with an adverbial agentphrase, much as in English (Anderson 1977, 1988). For Old Indicthis analysis has, on the face of it, strong support from case-marking, the instrumental being the canonical marker of the agentphrase in ‘other’ passives as well. The difficulty with this analysislies in the fact that in the ergative construction, unlike in a passive,it is the agent which has topic and subject status so that the passive-to-ergative hypothesis needs to postulate a so-called markednessshift in which the rhematic agent phrase has acquired topic andsubject status. I am here proposing an alternative hypothesis whichinterprets the agent phrase as a possessive modifier raised out of itsnoun phrase to clause level (see 5.1). This has the advantage that theagent is, from the beginning, in the crucial clause-initial positionbecause the genitival modifier precedes its head. In the followingsections I will develop this hypothesis step by step.

1.2. The Old Indic and Old Iranian ancestors of the modern ergativeconstruction

The immediate ancestors of the present-day ergative construction ofthe Indic and Iranian languages are readily identifiable. They maybe illustrated, on the Indic side, by example (5) from ClassicalSanskrit4 and, on the Iranian side, by example (6) from Old Persian.It will be seen that in both instances the verb is in the form of the

4 I will normally employ the short label ‘Sanskrit’ rather than the more precise‘Epic and Classical Sanskrit’.


past participle functioning as a finite verb, the patient is in theunmarked nominative case, and the agent is oblique-marked,although not uniformly in the two branches (Old Indic employs theinstrumental, Old Persian the genitive). The construction wouldinitially have had the status of a perfect (with current relevance atthe time of speaking) and, like many perfects elsewhere, wouldsubsequently have become a past tense. As will be seen from thetranslations cited, the construction has generally been analysed as apassive although it is often translated as an active.5

(5) a. may�a br�ahman:o dr:s: t:ah: .I.INS brahman.NOM see.PP.NOM.SG.M‘The brahman was seen by me.’ (Burrow 1965:354)

b. sa may�a dr:s: t:ah: .he.NOM I.INS see.PP.NOM.SG.M‘He (was) seen by me’ for ‘I saw him.’(Burrow 1965:369)

c. (aham) br�ahman:am apasyam.(I.NOM) brahman.ACC see.1SG.IMPF

‘I saw the brahman.’ (Burrow 1965:355)

(6) a. ima taya man�a krtam.this.N what.N I.GEN do.PP.N‘Voici ce que j’ai fait.’, litt. ‘ce qui par moi a ete fait.’(‘This is what I have done.’ Literally: ‘That which by mehas been done.’) (DB I. 27; Benveniste 1966:177)

b. *man�a ima krtam.I.GEN this.N do.PP.N‘I have done this.’

Burrow,while accepting its historical derivation fromapassive, clearlyhad reservations regarding the synchronic status of the construction inSanskrit. For, in characterising it as ‘Prakrit in disguise’ (1965:354),he anticipated for it the active-voice valuewhich it undoubtedly had in

5 It is this object-orientation which for a Sanskritist constitutes the definingcharacteristic of the passive. For P�an: ini the past participle and the -ya-passive havestem suffixes which designate the patient’s perspective whereas the present activedesignates that of the agent (J.C.Wright, p.c.).


later language states. But it is clear that this active-voice status musthave applied in Sanskrit itself given that the construction came toreplace the inherited past tense clause with nominative subject andfinite verb (5c), which was becoming moribund. I will attempt todemonstrate in what follows that the construction never had passivestatus and was in fact ergative already in Sanskrit.

The corresponding Iranian construction in (6) had also long beenconsidered a passive but, since this was challenged by Benveniste(1952 ¼ 1966:176–86), it has by some been reinterpreted as apossessive construction with a ‘possessive agent’. A strong argumentin favour of this analysis lies in the fact that predicative possessiveexpressions and transitive perfects have parallel structures in a widerange of languages and that this structural parallelism extends to OldIndic. In the following sections I shall discuss first the situation inSanskrit, and then go back to the earlier Vedic and forwards toMiddle Indic. Finally I will return to Old Iranian in 4.2 and 7.

2. THE ERGATIVE CONSTRUCTION IN (EPIC AND CLASSICAL) SANSKRIT

As outlined in Table 2 (adapted from Bubenik 1998:19) the OldIndic period is represented by two chronologically and dialectallydistinct varieties, the more modern Sanskrit and the more archaiclanguage of the Vedas. Grammatically Vedic is very conservative,its morphology most closely resembling that of early Greek.6

Sanskrit, its close relative rather than its direct descendant,although initially retaining the full spectrum of inherited morpho-

Table 2

OLD INDIC MIDDLE INDIC NEW INDIC

HIGH Sanskrit Sanskrit SanskritVedic Sanskrit Pr�akrits Pr�akrits Pr�akrits

Apabhram: sa Apabhram: saLOW Modern Languages

6 Broadly speaking the paradigm of the verb comprises three tense complexes basedrespectively on the present, aorist, and perfect stem; three voices (active, mediopassive,and passive), three moods (indicative, subjunctive, and optative). The so-called pasttenses comprise imperfect, aorist, and perfect; the non-finite forms include the pastparticiple in -ta/-na-, the future participle (or gerundive), and the gerund or absolutive.


logical forms made increasing use of impersonal expressions and ofsuch nominal forms of the verb as the gerundive (future participle)and the past participle as finite forms.

Those who subscribe to the view that the ergative construction ofthe modern Indic languages goes back to a Sanskrit passive (that isto say both traditional grammarians and modern linguists such asAnderson 1977, 1988, Bubenik 1989, 1993, 1988, Masica 1991:341),have always had difficulty in specifying at precisely what stage thesupposed passive-to-ergative reanalysis took place. In one sense thisis hardly surprising since a syntactic reanalysis, being the attribu-tion of a new structure to an existing string, is by its very naturecovert (‘invisible’). But one would expect it to manifest itself in itsconsequences, in the present instance in a word-order changepromoting the agent to subject position. It has however repeatedlybeen noted that in the past participle clause with an overt (non-clitic) agent this had always occupied the clause-initial subjectposition. Lahiri’s counts of word-order patterns in Old Indic prosetexts led him to conclude that in ‘passive’ clauses with overt subjectand object (that is, in practice, past participle clauses) ‘the order ofthe (original) active sentence is preserved so that all the texts preferto put the agent (which is in the instrumental) before the passivesubject (which is in the nominative)’ (1935:338). Hock (1986:16)makes the same point. This state of affairs led perceptive adherentsof the passive-origin hypothesis to describe this claimed passivesource as having been ‘non-promotional’, the agent retaining thesubject position and the patient retaining the object positionascribed to them in the underlying structure (Pray 1976, with specialreference to example (11) below). I am here interpreting this so-called non-promotional passive as simply an ergative construction.

The claim that the construction was already ergative in Sanskritis supported by the fact that it satisfied the formal criteria whichdefine ergative clause-marking (Klaiman 1978, Andersen 1986a,b,Hock 1986, Tikkanen 1987). For, as far as past participle clauses areconcerned, the intransitive subject (S) is case-marked in the sameway as the transitive object (O), both these being old nominatives,while the transitive agent is oblique-marked. (Only in finite-verbclauses was the transitive object accusative-marked and thusformally distinct from the intransitive subject (nominative-marked),


and even here this was only so in the case of the masculine andfeminine.) This ergative analysis of the Sanskrit past participleclause is, however, by no means generally accepted. There are thosewho consider that the development of ergative clause markingpresupposes, according to the definition of ergative alignment givenin 1 above, the prior existence of an absolutive case (Bubenik 1989,1993, 1998:4). This case was the result of the merger of thenominative and the accusative, a change which would appear tohave reached completion only in Late Middle/Early Modern Indic7

so that, in the period preceding this merger, the construction whichI am interpreting as ergative would have been ‘syntacticallyambiguous but formally passive’ (Bubenik 1998:4).

There are three powerful arguments which speak against thismorphology-centred approach. Firstly, what I am here identifyingas the ergative construction is found in Sanskrit texts in apparentlyfree variation with old-style past tense clauses characterised by anominative-marked subject and finite verb in the active voice, theselection by the speaker of one or other variant being sociolinguis-tically, and certainly not grammatically determined. Secondly it canbe shown that over time, and at different speeds in different genres,the old-style aorist, perfect and imperfect clauses were beingreplaced by past participle clauses. Thirdly it will be seen that thesyntactic arguments drawn from clause-conjoining (illustrated in(3–4) above from present-day Indo-Iranian languages) would haveapplied to a large extent already in Sanskrit. These three argumentswill now be discussed in turn.

A particularly striking illustration of the syntactic variationbetween old-style finite-verb and new-style past participle clauses isto be found in two successive passages of the R�am�ayan:a, (2.57) and(2.58), both of which narrate the same sequence of events.8 Theepisode being described is a tragic hunting accident in which theprince accidentally kills a young hermit. In the first version (7a, 8a)

7 The majority of dialects in fact continue to retain contrasting nominative andaccusative forms in the first and second person pronouns. The result is an ‘animacy’-based split system which may happily co-occur with the aspect-based one. See forinstance Farrell (1995) for Baluchi.

8 I am indebted to Renate Sohnen-Thieme (SOAS) for drawing my attention tothese two versions which figure in her current work on such alternative encodings.


the prince is telling the story to his wife, in the second version (7b, 8b)he is repeating his description of what happened but this time inmorecolloquial terms, employing the actual words he used when he wasspeaking to the youngman’s humble parents. The syntactic variationis between, in the first version, the inherited old-style grammar, whichemploys finite aorist forms with the subject/agent marked in theverbal ending and, in the second version, the new-style grammarwhich employs predicative ta-participles with the subject/agent in theform of an overt personal pronoun (in the nominative when the verbis intransitive, in the instrumental when it is transitive). Since thecorresponding clauses occur in the same positions in the discoursethey must be considered as equivalent alternative encodings, theselection of one or other being simply a matter of register.

(7) a. saray�um anu+ag�am: nadı�m.Sarayu.ACC PV+go.1SG.AOR river.ACC‘I set out along the river Sarayu.’ (R 2.57.14)

b. aham: saray�utı�ram �agatah: .I.NOM Sarayu.bank.ACC PV.go.PP.NOM.M‘I came to the bank of the Sarayu.’(R 2.58.12)

(8) a. asraus:am . . . ghos:am.hear.1sgAOR noise.ACC‘I heard a noise.’ (R 2.57.16)

b. sruto may�a sabdo.hear.PP.NOM.M I.INS sound.NOM

‘I heard a sound.’ (R 2.58.13)

With regard to the progress over time of the replacement of the old-style inherited forms by the new-style forms, Bloch (1906:48, 58)counted in the Mah�abh�arata some 150 main-clause past participlepredicates as against 1033 finite verbs, whereas in the laterVet�alapancavim: satik�akath�a the proportion was reversed. In thislatter text he counted some 1750 ‘nominal clauses’9 (a majorityhaving a predicative past participle) as against 790 finite verbs (nowmainly present-tense forms), a development which he described as‘the decomposition of the old verbal system’ (1906:93). It is clear,

9 ‘Nominal clauses’ are defined as lacking a finite verb or overt auxiliary.


then, that the predicative past participle was rapidly gaining groundas the normal expression of past tense, any surviving finite pasttense forms now being sporadic and archaic (1906:85–6). Thisreplacement of inherited synthetic verb forms by the past participlehas parallels in other Indo-European languages. What is different inSanskrit is merely the syntactic form (see 4.2 below).

With a transitive verb Sanskrit thus had the following three basicclause types:

(i) the inherited active-voice clause, with topical subject/agentin the nominative and a finite verb in the active voice;

(ii) the ergative clause, with topical subject/agent in the instru-mental and the past participle agreeing with the patient;

(iii) the passive clause, with topical subject/patient in thenominative and finite ya-passive, the agent if present beingin the instrumental.

Seen from this perspective the transitive clauses illustrated in (5a-b)and (8b) are to be interpreted not as passives but as ergatives, the agenthaving subject status in spite of being oblique-marked. The syntacticsubject criteria which are standard in the grammatical analysis ofpresent-day Indic languages (that is to say the rules which governreflexivisation, raising, and ellipsis in complex sentences: Y.Kachruet al. 1976:90ff.; Masica 1991:339–62) would widely have appliedalready in Sanskrit (Hock 1991a,b). I shall here, by way of my thirdargument, illustrate only one of these criteria, namely ellipsis inconjoined clauses.

If an intransitive and a transitive clause are conjoined, it is A andS which pattern together irrespective of case-marking (although intexts this rule was not without exceptions).10 The examples at (9)and (10), taken from the above cited R�am�ayan:a passage, illustratethis point. They show an initial gerund clause in conjunction with

10 For illustration and discussion of complexities see Sohnen 1985. According toHock (1991a:61ff.) apparent contradictions can be resolved by means of multiplebracketings. Tikkanen (1987:147f.) formulated the rule more neutrally: ‘‘The gerundbeing mostly active and personal by construction, its implicit subject or agent hastypically the role of Actor and is normally coreferential with that (core) argument of thesuperordinate clause which ranks highest when considering criteria of Actorhood,Topicality and Animacy/Empathy. In [old-style, ThB] active and passive clauses this ismostly the subject, but in ergative clauses it is the oblique agent.’’ For illustration of thereverse clause order, with the transitive clause preceding, see Bubenik 1998:157.


an old-style (9) and a new style (10) main clause. Those in (11–14),taken from later texts, contain only new-style ergative main clauses.It will be seen that the published translations often oscillate betweenan active and a passive-voice reading, the alternative translationsbeing treated as mere stylistic variants of a passive original. Thepassive analysis of these sentences, which identifies the nominativephrase as the subject, was able in practice to go unchallengedbecause, ignoring considerations of discourse structure, both typesof clause encoded the same proposition. It will however be seenfrom these examples that only the active-voice analysis does in factcorrectly render the discourse structure of the text.

(9) saram uddhr: tya . . . amuncam: nisitam: b�an:am.shaft.ACC PV.draw.GER . . . shoot.1SG.IMPF sharp.ACC arrow.ACC‘Drawing out a shaft I shot a keen-edged arrow.’ (R 2.57.17)

(10) sabdam �alaks:ya may�a . . . visr:s: t:o n�ar�acah: .sound.ACC aim.GER I.INS release.PP.NOM.M arrow.NOM

‘Aiming at the sound I released an arrow.’ (R 2.58.15)

(11) tapah: kr: tv�a may�a devo �ar�adhitah: .austerity do.GER I.INS god.NOM propitiate.PP.NOM.M‘Having performed austerities I propitiated the god.’ (Pray1976:202)

(12) so+ayam tvay�a sam�akramya paribhuktah:and+this.NOM.M you.INS PV.PV.enter.GER PV.enjoy.PP.NOM.Mstriy�a saha.woman.INS with‘And you have entered and enjoyed this (abode of mine)together with a woman.’ (KSS 12.27.72; Breunis 1990:119)

(13) tay�a srutv�a ca nirbhartsyashe.INS hear.GER and PV.revile.GERp�an: ibhy�am aham �ahat�a.hands.INS.DUAL I.NOM PV.beat.PP.NOM.F‘When she heard me, she railed at me and I was beaten by her.’(KSS 12.8.101; Breunis 1990:116)‘And on hearing (this), she scolded me and beat me with herhands.’ (J.C.Wright, p.c.)


(14) r�aks:asena+apahr: tya s�a nı�t�ademon.INS+PV.carry.GER she.NOM lead.PP.NOM.FVindhy�at:avim.Vindhy�at:avi.ACC‘She is taken along to the Vindhya forest by a demon, whohas abducted her.’ (KSS 12.12.31; Breunis 1990:117)‘The demon, having taken her away, led her to the Vindyaforest.’

Example (15) illustrates a fragment of narrative text in which thesuccessive clauses have a single topic which is also the syntacticsubject. This has instrumental marking in the first two clauses,which are ergative constructions, and nominative marking in thelast clause, which is intransitive, the accusative here marking thegoal of the movement and not a direct object.

(15) yad�a. . . anusmr: tam devena satyam

when remember.PP.N divine.INS truth.N

�ud:ha+p�urv�a . . . may�a . . . sakuntal�a

married+before.NOM.F I.INS Sakuntala.NOM

praty�adis: t:�a+iti tad�a pasc�at-t�apam

PV.PV.show.PP.NOM.F+QUOT then remorse.ACC

anugato devah: .

PV.go.PP.NOM.M god.NOM

‘When it was remembered by his majesty (that) in truth Sakuntalawas previously married by him and (then) rejected then he enteredupon remorse.’(Sak.VI, 4; Jamison 1990:1)‘When the divine remembered the truth that he had earlier marriedSakuntala and [then] rejected her (literally, ‘‘I earlier marriedSakuntala and rejected her’’), he then entered upon remorse.’

In this present section I have attempted to document, howevercursorily, the shift within Sanskrit from the older, Indo-Europeanstyle nominative-accusative type clause structure to the splitsystem of those present-day Indic languages which have preservedergative clause structure. It has been shown that, already inSanskrit, subject role can no longer be defined by reference tonominative case and verb agreement and that in the ergativeconstruction these morphological subject properties are with the


morphologically unmarked patient (which continues the oldnominative-marked subject) whereas discourse-syntactic criteraidentify the agent as the subject.11 The Sanskrit ergative clause,with overt subject in the instrumental and transitive past participlein the role of finite verb, increasingly represents the normalencoding of the transitive verb in the past tense and, leaving asidesociolinguistic and stylistic factors, is a free variant of the old-styleclause with a nominative subject and a finite active-voice pasttense verb (especially the aorist) which it was in the process ofreplacing. From the perspective of the historical grammar of Indo-Iranian, however, it is to be noted that this particular ergativeclause structure lacks direct counterparts in both the earliest OldIndic (section 3) and Old Iranian (section 4.2).

3. THE PRE-ERGATIVE CONSTRUCTION IN VEDIC

While it is true to say that in the archaic language of the Vedichymns past participles with an instrumental agent were amplyattested, these were almost exclusively of the properly participial,non-finite type, which indeed had passive construction (see 16b).The overwhelming presence in texts of these participles may haveled adherents of the passive-origin hypothesis to assume a historicalcontinuity between Vedic and Sanskrit which, in fact, simply doesnot exist. For it is significant that with main-clause finite pastparticiples an overt agent was, as noted by Jamison (1979a:201–2)and earlier by Speijer (1886 [1993]: 255), extremely rare indeed inearly Vedic, and when it became more frequent in prose texts theevidence overwhelmingly points to the genitive case, and notthe instrumental, as its canonical encoding. I hope to show that theVedic proto-type of the Sanskrit ergative construction (which I willrefer to as the ‘pre-ergative’ construction) was an intransitive mainclause with a noun phrase in the genitive, which encoded thepossessor of the O actant of the participle and which could also beread as the agent. I will attempt to show that this source

11 Hock surmised (1986:22) that it was this change from subject to agent-orientedsyntax which explains why the Indian grammarians avoided operating with thegrammatical category ‘subject’.


construction was a modally marked form, a so-called evidentialwhich indicated that the depicted event had been accessedindirectly, be it through inference or be it from handed-downknowledge (‘report’) (see 5.2 below). In view of the fact howeverthat, in English, epistemic modals imply doubts regarding the truthof the stated proposition, I will adopt a modally neutral translation.It will be seen in section 5 that the proposed evidential readingnaturally follows from the here-and-now reference of the pastparticiple on the one hand and the possessor role of the agent on theother.

The following Vedic data have been drawn from the grammaticalliterature, supplemented by targeted searches in Lubotsky’s con-cordance to the Rigveda (Lubotsky 1997). Each example will befollowed by a text reference and the source from which it wasobtained.12 It has also been systematically glossed and followed byone or more attributed translations. Geldner’s German translation,which covers the entire Rigveda, is simply labelled ‘Geldner’; myEnglish rendering where this was felt to be useful, follows inbrackets. Unattributed alternative translations are my own, themore doubtful ones being preceded by a question mark. I have feltthis rather cumbersome procedure to be necessary in order toindicate the very real discrepancies which sometimes exist betweenscholars in the interpretation of certain of the more difficultpassages.

In view of the fact that the deities to whom the hymns areaddressed and their worshippers represent given information, therespective pronouns appear, as a rule, in clitic form. Barred fromclause-initial position for prosodic reasons, these clitics normallyoccupy the second position in the clause (that is following the firstaccented word, in conformity with Wackernagel’s Law), irrespect-ive of whether they represent an actant of the verb or form part of anoun phrase the rest of which is located elsewhere in the clause.Many are morphologically underspecified, those of the first andsecond persons for instance representing a genitive or dative in thesingular and a genitive, dative or accusative in the plural, and areglossed ‘1SG’, ‘2SG’.

12 The abbreviations are those of the standard handbooks and grammars.


3.1. The case of the transitive agent

The only statistical information on early Vedic of which I amaware comes from Jamison (1979a,b), who carried out propercounts of the morphological encoding of the ‘‘passive’’ agent forboth the Rigveda and the Atharvaveda. Although she did notseparate out the figures for non-finite and finite past participlesshe states that the past participles in these texts were overwhelm-ingly non-finite. She found that the transitive agent had inprinciple three possible encodings: the bare stem forming acompound with the participle, or the instrumental or the genitiveform of the nominal. These are illustrated in (16) from theproperly participial, non-finite past participle. It will be seen thatthis was, together with its satellites, embedded in a noun phrase,its empty subject copying the gender, number and case marking ofthe head noun.

(16) a. ı�ndrapras�ut�a varun: aprasis: t:�a

Indra.PV.impel.PP.NOM.M.PL Varun: a.PV.rule.PP.NOM.M.PLye s�u�ryasya jyotis:o bh�a�gamwho.NOM.M.PL sun.GEN light.GEN share.ACC�a�nasuh: . . .attain.3PL.PERF

‘Those who, urged forth by Indra, instructed by Varun: a, have obtainedtheir share of the sun’s light . . .’ (RV 10.66.2; cf.Jamison 1979a:202)

b. �a�po devebhir nı�vr: t�awater.NOM.PL god.INS.PL PV.cover.PP.NOM.PLatis: t:han.stand.3PL.IMPF

‘The waters stood enclosed by the gods.’ (RV 10.98.6; Jamison1979a: 205)

c. et�a� cyautn�a�ni te kr: t�a� vars: is: t:h�ani parı�n: as�a

�

this.N.PL endeavour.N.PL 2SG do.PP.N.PL highest.N.PL in.fullhr:d�a

� v�ıd:v adh�arayah: .heart.INS firm(ly) hold.2sgIMPF‘Diese hochsten Großtaten, die vollzahlig von dir getan sind, hastdu im Herzen fest beschlossen.’ (‘You firmly enclosed in your heartthose paramount deeds which you have performed in full.’) (RV 8.77.9;Geldner)

It is important to note that these three possible encodings of theagent show strikingly different frequencies. Jamison (1979b:130ff.) found, in the Rigveda and Atharvaveda, hundreds of


instances of the instrumental and the compound types as againsta mere 20 to 30 possible instances of the genitive type –‘possible’ instances because she analysed the sentences in whichthese occur as being potentially ambiguous, in that the genitivephrase may be read either adnominally or as the agent of (theverb underlying) the past participle. For example in (17) Geldneranalysed the genitive phrase as a possessive modifier whereasCardona considered that it (also) had agent role (Cardona1970:9), supporting his analysis by reference to structures suchas those in (18), in which the subject of the relative clause is co-referential with the possessor phrase of the main clause (thereferent of vajr�ı� ‘the one with the thunderbolt’ and of maghav�a‘the bountiful one’ being Indra). The situation is thus in fact notso much one of straightforward alternative analyses but it israther the case that the agentive reading presupposes theadnominal possessive role of the genitive phrase (hence theterm the ‘possessive agent’).

(17) a. ı�ndrasya vocam: pra kr: t�a�ni vı�ry�a�.

Indra.GEN call.1SG.INJ PV do.PP.N.PL deed.N.PL‘I shall proclaim Indra’s manly deeds performed (by him).’(RV 2.21.3; Cardona 1970:9, the translation reconstructedfrom his rendering of 17c)‘Des Indra vollbrachte Heldentaten will ich verkunden.’(‘I shall proclaim Indra’s accomplished deeds.’) (Geldner)

b. vı�sv�a+�ıd+ı�ndrasya v�ıry�a� kr: t�a�ni.

all.N.PL+PRT+Indra.GEN deed.N.PL do.PP.N.PL

‘all Indra’s manly deeds performed (by him)’ (RV 7.18.14;Cardona 1970:9, with the translation reconstructed fromhis rendering of 17c)‘alles Heldentaten, die Indra vollbracht hat’ (‘all[these being] heroic deeds accomplished by Indra’)(Geldner)

c. pra te+indra v�ıry�a� vocam: pratham�a� kr: t�a�ni.

PV 2SG+Indra.VOC deed.N.PL call.1SG.INJ first.N.PL do.PP.N.PL

‘I shall proclaim, Indra, your manly deeds, first performed(by you).’ (RV 10.112.8; Cardona 1970:9)‘Ich will . . . deine erstgetanen Heldentaten verkunden, Indra.’(‘I shall proclaim your earliest-performed heroic deeds.’)(Geldner)


(18) a. ı�ndrasya nu vı�ry�a�n: i pravocam: y�a�niIndra.GEN PRT deed.N.PL PV call.1SG.INJ which.N.PLcak�a�ra pratham�a�ni vajr�ı�.do.3SG.PERF first.N.PL with.club.NOM

‘I shall proclaim the manly deeds of Indra, which thebearer of the vajra first performed.’ (RV 1.32.1; Cardona1970:8)‘Des Indra Heldentaten will ich nun verkunden, die ersten,die der Keulentrager getan hat.’ (‘I shall proclaim Indra’sheroic deeds . . .’) (Geldner)

b. pra+ı�ndrasya vocam pratham�a� kr: t�a�ni pra

PV+Indra.GEN call.1SG.INJ first.N.PL deed.N.PL PV

n�u�tan�a maghav�a y�a� cak�a�ra.recent.N.PL bountiful.NOM REL.N.PL do.3SG.PERF‘I shall proclaim the first deeds of Indra [and] the recentones, which the generous one has performed.’(RV 7.98.5; Cardona 1970:9)‘Ich will die fruhesten Taten des Indra verkunden unddie neuesten, die der Gabenreiche vollbracht hat.’(‘I shall proclaim Indra’s first deeds . . .’) (Geldner)

3.2. The ‘possessive agent’ with main-clause finite past participle

By contrast with non-finite embedded participial clauses, mainclauses with a finite past participle and overt agent seem almostnon-existent in the early language. Example (19), with agenitival possessor which is potentially also the agent, isRigvedic but it is from the late Book 10. The remainingexamples are from prose texts which, according to Hock(1986:20), were the first to attest to the productive use of thetransitive ta-participle as a main verb. Pace Jamison who treatsit as embedded, the context (see 19’) suggests that (19) is a mainclause. It also suggests that the sentence does not constitute aneye-witness account of Indra smashing his enemies. It wouldrather seem to be the case that the departure of the defeatedenemies had led the poet to conclude, be it from the actualsituation on the ground or from ‘reported’ knowledge, that


either (i) Indra’s enemies are now all beaten (adnominal) or (ii)Indra has now/will now have beaten all his enemies (agentive).Reasons for the evidential reading of the pre-ergative construc-tion are discussed in section 5, my basic contention being that itis its possessor status in relation to the other noun phrase whichlicenses both the agentive reading of the genitive phrase and themodal semantics of the clause.

(19) hat�a� ı�ndrasya satravah:smash.PP.NOM.M.PL Indra.GEN enemy.NOM.PLEither (i) adnominal: ‘Indra’s rivals, smashed (by Indra)’ �‘Indra’s smashed rivals’; or (ii) agentive: ‘the rivals smashedby Indra’ (RV 10.155.4; Jamison 1979b:134)

(190) yad+ha pr�a�cı�r ajaganta13 . . .when+PRT east.NOM.PL.F go.2PL.PLUPERF

hat�a� ı�ndrasya satravah:smash.PP.NOM.PL.M Indra.GEN enemy.NOM.PLsarve budbuday�asavah: .all.NOMpl.M . . . with.bubbly.semen.NOMpl.M‘Wenn ihr . . . weggegangen seid . . ., so sind alle blasen-samigen Feinde Indra’s erschlagen.’ (‘. . . all Indra’s . . .enemies are beaten’) (Geldner)‘When you have gone away . . . [either] Indra’s enemies areall beaten [or] Indra has all his enemies beaten/has beatenall his enemies.’

All my other examples of main-clause genitive agents are post-Rigvedic, taken from prose texts concerned with ritual anddoctrine. (20) occurs in a passage concerned with the agnihotram(‘fire-offering’). The context says that the libations which formpart of this offering rise upward and enter the air, from whencethey can enter man making his mouth his offering fire and foodhis libation. Eating food is thus an enactment of the fire offering.

13 According to Paul Thieme, Das Plusquamperfektum im Veda (1929:30) ‘ajaganscheint immer aoristisch verwendet zu sein’ (J.C.Wright, p.c.).


The verb is hu- ‘to pour (or cast) into the fire’. Given that the actof sacrificing implies casting one’s own offering, a possessiverelationship is inherently present between the person whoperforms the sacrifice and his offering. The fact on the otherhand that the genitive phrase is in a clause which forms one halfof a correlative construction and resumes the canonical subject ofthe other clause would again support its analysis as a clause levelconstituent. Despite its topic status and agentive properties it ishowever not the syntactic subject. Oertel follows tradition inoffering a passive interpretation. In view of the fact that all theexamples in (20–2) record traditional knowlege (‘hearsay’) theyjustify an evidential reading.

(20) a. yah: . . . agnihotram: juhoti

who.NOM.M Agni-sacrifice.N offer.3SG.PREStasya sarves:u lokes:u sarves:u bh�utes:uhe.GEN all.LOC.PL world.LOC.PL all.LOC.PL creature.LOC.PLsarvesv �a�tmasu hutam: bhavati.all.LOC.PL selves.LOC.PL poured.N become.3SG.PRES‘He who performs the Agnihotra by him offering is/becomes/getsperformed in every world, in every creature, in every self’ ((ChUp 5.24.2;Jamison 1990:16)‘He who offers the Agnihotra has performed his offering in everyworld . . ..’

b. tasy�am eva+asya tad devat�ayam: hutam:that.LOC. PRT+he.GEN that.N deity.LOC. offer.PP.Nbhavati ya evam: veda.becomes who.NOM.M this.N know.3SG.PERF‘Thus that is/becomes/gets offered in this divinity by him who knowsthus.’ (AV 15.13.9; Jamison 1990:15)‘He who knows this has performed his offering to that deity.’

In (21) the genitive phrase has again a phrase level (adnominal)and potentially also a clause level role, the latter reading againbeing favoured by the role of the participle clause in thecorrelative construction. This example is crucial to the presentsemantic analysis because it contains, in the formula ‘they say’, anexplicit reference to the fact that the utterance conveys ‘reported’knowledge. The PP is hita-, from dh�a- ‘to put’, preceded bynegative an-.


(21) an�ahitas tasya+agnir ity �ahurunlay.PP.NOM.M he.GEN+fire.NOM QUOT say.3PL.PERFyah: samidho+an�adh�ay�a+agnimwho.NOM log.ACC.PL+NEG.lay.GER+fire.ACC�a�dhatta iti.PV.lay.3sgPRES.MID. QUOT

(i) ‘Nicht gegrundet ist dessen Feuer/(ii) Nicht gegrundet istdas Feuer von dem, so sagt man, der, ohne vorher die Scheite(im Brahmaudanafeuer) aufgelegt zu haben, sich die Feuergrundet.’ (‘They say that (a) the fire of him who, havingkindled without first having placed the logs (in the B. fire), isnot founded’/(b) ‘By him who . . .. the fire is not founded . . . ’)(TB 1.1.9.10; Oertel 1994:1106)?‘They say that he has not (properly) laid his fire who lays thefire without (first) having placed the logs . . ..’

Example (22) introduces a further source of ambiguity which arisesfrom the fact that, from Vedic onwards, the genitive case wasfrequently substituted for the dative, which had become increas-ingly vulnerable (Speijer [1886]1993:63). Oertel treated (22) as triplyambiguous since the genitive phrase can in theory not only bepossessive (i) or agentive (ii) but also benefactive (iii). Note that inits agentive reading it again correlates with the canonical subject ofthe other clause. The PP in (22) is kr�ıta-, from kr�ı- ‘to buy’.

(22) tr: t�ıyena+asya tasy�a (scil. goh: ) �atmanas

third.INS+he.GEN she.GEN (scil. cow) self.GENtr: tı�yena ca sahasrasya payasah:third.INS and thousand.GEN milk.GENsomah: kr�ıto bhavatisoma.NOM buy.PP.NOM become.3SG.PRESya evam: vidv�an somam: krı�n: �ati.who.NOM thus knowing.NOM soma.ACC buy.3SG.PRES

‘Fur ein Drittel des Selbstes dieser (Kuh) und fur ein Drittel derMilch eines Tausends(i) wird dessen Soma gekauft (the soma of him is bought who . . .)(ii) wird der Soma von dem gekauft (the soma is bought by him who. . .)


(iii) wird fur den der Soma gekauft (the soma is bought for him who. . .)der so wissend den Soma kauft.’ (PB 21.1.4; Oertel 1994:1109).Caland, quoted by Oertel (1994:1129) translates (ii) as: ‘For thethird part of this (cow’s) self and for a third part of the milk of athousand is the soma bought by him who, knowing this, buys thesoma.’?‘He will buy his soma for [the price of] one third of the body of acow and one third of the milk of a thousand [cows] who, in thisknowledge, goes to buy his soma.’

3.3. The non-possessive, lexically determined ‘genitive agent’

In the archaic language a second context for ‘genitive agents’ isfound with verbs of perception, consumption, and enjoyment,‘which in the active show variation in the case of the complementand in the passive [in which category she included the present pastparticiple construction with overt agent] sometimes take non-instrumental agents’ (Jamison 1979b:134). This verb class (in whichshe tentatively also includes verbs of ritual activity such as praising)comprises verbs such as ‘become aware, see’, ‘hear’, which inpresent-day Indic languages (see 5.4 below and Masica 1991:346–56, Shibatani and Pardeshi 2001) have dative-subject constructions.Note that in (23–4) the past participle is followed by an overtauxiliary.14

(23) anuspas: t:o bhavaty es: o asya

PV.see.PP.NOM.M become.3SG.PRES he.NOM.M he.GENyo asmai rev�a�n na sunoti somam.who.NOM.M he.DAT rich.NOM.M not press.3SG.PRES soma.ACC‘He who does not press soma is/becomes/gets spied out by him (¼Indra).’(RV 10.160.4; Jamison 1979b:134¼1990:15)‘Der wird von ihm bemerkt, der Reiche, der ihm nicht Soma auspresst.’(‘The rich one who does not press soma for him is noticed by him (Geldner)‘He will have spotted the one who . . ..’

14 According to Jamison (1990:9–18) the past participle on its own is stative(?resultative ThB) while an overt auxiliary adds an aspectual component, bh�a�-making it dynamic/eventive.


(24) tad v�a r:s:�ın:�am anusrutam �asa.that.N PRT poet.GEN.PL hear.PP.N was‘That was heard by (of) the singers.’ (SB1.6.2.1¼3.2.2.3;Macdonell 1958:330)‘Thus the bards (have) heard.’

3.4. Instrumental agent and subordinate finite past participle

It needs to be stated that instances of a past participle with whatappears to be an instrumental-marked agent do exist in the Rigvedaand Atharvaveda, even at a time when ‘genitive agents’ were stillseverely constrained. These putative agents seem however confinedto subordinate though finite relative clauses beginning with therelative or demonstrative pronoun in the instrumental case(Jamison (1979a:202). There is no mention of main clauses.15 Thecited translations again oscillate between a passive and an activerendering. Example (25a) appears in a sequence of relative clauseswhich recall Indra’s heroic deeds and which all lead up to therecurrent refrain ‘he, o ye people, is Indra’. The great majority(some thirty) have the relative pronoun in the nominative case anda finite verb in the active voice (‘(He) who stabilised the swayingearth, who calmed the raging mountains, who slew the dragon, whoencourages the sick, . . .’) while others have the relative pronoun inthe genitive, accusative or instrumental without there being anydiscernable difference in modality. Example (25b) closely parallels

15 The following may seem a potential example. It has by some been interpreted asa main clause with an instrumental-marked agent. But according to the scholarlycommentaries the syntactic division comes before hitah: which makes the pastparticiple clause subordinate and non-finite (J.C.Wright, p.c.).

tvam agne yajn�a�n�am:you.NOM Agni.VOC sacrifice.GEN.PLhot�a vısves:�am hitah:priest.NOM.SG all.GEN.PL placed.NOM.SGdevebhir m�a�nus: e jane.gods.INS human.LOC kind.LOC

‘Du, Agni, bist zum Priester aller Opfer von den Gottern bei demMenschenvolk bestellt.’ (RV 6.16.1; Geldner)‘Thou art the hotr: installed by gods among men.’ (J.C.Wright, p.c.)


(25a), recounting the same primordial events. The first and last linehere have a finite-verb predicate and the instrumental phrase of thelatter occurs alongside a canonical subject. I record the existence ofthis clause type for the sake of completeness without offering ananalysis. In context a modal reading seems firmly excluded.

(25) a. yena+im�a� vı�sv�a cyavana krt�a�ni

who.INS+this.N.PL all.N.PL deed.PL do.PP.N.PLyo d�a�sam: varn: am adharam . . .who.NOM black colour subdue.3SG.IMPF

‘Durch den alle diese Umwalzungen geschehen sind, der die dasischeRasse unterworfen hat . . .’(‘Through whom all these changes havebeen made, who subjugated the Dasic race, . . .’) (RV 2.12.4; Geldner)

b. rohito dy�a�v�apr: thiv�ı� adr:m: hat

ruddy.NOM heaven.earth.ACC.DUAL make.firm.3SG.IMPF

tena sva stabhitam: tena n�a�kah:he.INS sun steady.PP.N he.INS vault.NOM

tena+antariks:am vı�mit�a raj�am: sihe.INS+sky.N PV.measure.PP.N.PL space.N.PLtena dev�a� amr: tam anvavindan.he.INS gods.NOM immortality.ACC PV.find.3PL.IMPF

‘The ruddy one made firm heaven and earth; by him was the sunpropped, by him the vault. By him the atmosphere, the spaces weremeasured out; by him the gods found immortality.’ (AV 13.1.7;Jamison 1990:9)

3.5. Genitive and instrumental

In attempting to make a case for the antiquity of the genitive agentin Vedic I have repeatedly referred to data and arguments fromCardona (1970) and Jamison (1979a,b) without however sharingtheir conclusion that the genitive agent must be an innovation.Cardona argued that, as a reanalysed possessor, the possessiveagent was syntactically and semantically derived and hence secon-dary by comparison with the instrumental agent, which lacked acomparable motivation and must needs represent the older enco-ding (his assumption always being that the construction was apassive). However, as I am here arguing that the pre-ergativeconstruction was not a passive and had a historical source otherthan a passive, it would rather be the case that the transparentorigin of the genitive agent, far from speaking against its antiquity,in fact forms an integral part of the modality of the construction(see section 5).


Leaving aside dative-subject verbs which are not at issue, thegenitive would initially have been the canonical marker of theagent with main-clause transitive past participles provided that itwas sanctioned by an adnominal possessive relationship. In theVedic prose texts he had examined, Oertel (1939 [1994: 1109f.])counted 429 possible genitive agents alongside 111 agents in theinstrumental, which means that genitive agents would haveoutnumbered instrumental agents by a ratio of 4:1. He alsofound genitive-marking occurring with the great majority of verbswhile only a minority had the instrumental or both cases, withoutthere being a lexical reason for the observed distribution. Thus,for instance, in the case of the past participle of kr: - ‘to make’there were, alongside twenty-four instances with the genitive onlyfour with the instrumental (as illustrated in (26). (Note that Oertelhas given a very minimum of context for his data; my translationsare tentative.)

(26) a. yady u vai pur�a s�amn�a+�artvijyam:

if PRT PRT before chant.INS+priestly function.Ncakartha j�amy u+eva tvay�a tat kr: tam.make.2SG.PERF repetition PRT+PRT you.INS that do.PP.N(JB 1.302; Oertel (1939/1994:12)?‘And if previously you performed priestly function withchant you (will) have done precisely that as a repetition.’

b. yady anena (scil. pitr�a) kimcid aks:n: ay�a+kr: tam bhavati . . .if this.INS(scil.father) anything incorrect+do.PP.N become.3SG.PRES?‘If the father has performed anything incorrectly . . .’ (SB 14.4.3.26;Oertel (1939 [1994]: 12+ note)

Oertel’s statistical data are in themselves of course not indicative ofthe direction of change. But there are a number of observationswhich suggest that it was the instrumental which was replacing thegenitive rather than the other way round. In addition to evidencefrom Middle Indic and Old Iranian (to be discussed in 4.1 and 4.2)it has been noted above in relation to example (22) that genitive-marking created ambiguities, the genitive being the rightful markerof the roles of possessor, possessive agent and beneficiary.Replacement of the agentive genitive by the instrumental as thecase par excellence of the agent with other constructions with


O-subject (passives included, see section 7) would reduce if notaltogether eliminate ambiguity.

A further step in the historical development may be seen in(27), noteworthy in two respects which are in fact closelyinterrelated. Firstly, unlike in previous examples the genitivephrase is not supported (‘licensed’) by a co-existing possessiverelationship and, secondly, the past participle is compoundedwith the negative a(n)-. It will be seen that both the first and thesecond line contain the genitive pronoun asya. While that ofthe first line, in the context of a finite verb, clearly encodes thebeneficiary, that of the second can in principle and in context beinterpreted as either the agent or the beneficiary. These twopossibilities are given in Oertel’s (slightly truncated) translationsat (i) and (ii). Note however that, in the case of the agentivereading, Oertel (who did not query the received passive status ofthe construction) had to assume a ‘switch of logical subject’,which he however considered to be ‘inoffensive’ in br�ahmanicstyle ([1939]1994:1107f.). I have suggested, at (iii) that, in view ofthe fact that the instrumental phrase ‘by means of this (scil.hymn)’ refers to priestly activity, the sacrificial priest beconsidered the agent of both clauses so that a switch of logicalsubject is not called for. (The past participle is �apta-, from �ap-‘to reach, attain’).

(27) tad eva+asya+etay�a (scil. r: c�a) sarvam �apnoti

that.N PRT+3sg.GEN+this.INS (hymn) all.N reach.3SG.PRESyad asya kimcana+an�aptam.what.N 3SG.GEN somewhat+NEG.reach.PP.N(i) ‘Er (der Opferpriester) erreicht fur ihn (den Opferherrn) was fur ihn(den Opferherrn bis jetzt noch) nicht erreicht war.’ (‘He (the sacrificialpriest) attains for him (the patron of the sacrifice) what for him (thepatron of the sacrifice) has not been attained.’)(ii) ‘Er (der Opferpriester) erreicht fur ihn (den Opferherrn) was von ihm(dem Opferherrn) nicht erreicht war [¼was er, der Opferherr, bis jetztnoch nicht erreicht hat].’ (‘He (the sacrificial priest) attains for him (thepatron of the sacrifice) what by him (the patron of the sacrifice) has not(so far) been attained [¼what he, the lord of the sacrifice, has not so farobtained].’ (SB 10.1.3.10, 11; Oertel 1994:1107; the underlined rewordingis Oertel’s own, the emphasis mine, ThB)(iii) ‘He (the sacrificial priest) attains for him (the patron of the sacrifice)by means of this (hymn) all that he (the priest) has not attained in anyother way.’


It is possible that negative past participles indeed played a role inthe historical change under review. Cardona (1970:7, whileadvocating a change different in substance from that arguedfor here) advanced the hypothesis that the syntax of the pastparticiple could have been influenced by that of the gerundive(future participle), for the reason that, in certain lexicallydetermined cases, the two categories overlapped semanticallyand the negative past participle could have the same potentialmeaning as the negative gerundive. Now in view of the fact thatthe model, in the form of the negative gerundive, lacked apossessive relationship the negative past participle need not haveone either. Compare (28–9) with (30). The potential ambiguity ofthe past participle astr: tam, from str: - ‘to scatter, to mow down’,which could mean not only ‘undefeated’ but also ‘undefeatable’,is illustrated in (28), the potential meaning of an�apta- ‘unattain-able’ in (29).

(28) kad �u vr: traghno astr: tam?what.N PRT Vr: tra-killer.GEN unscattered.N‘Is there anything invincible for/not laid low by thedestroyer of Vr: tra?’ (RV 8.66.10; Cardona 1970:7)

(29) yasna+an�aptah: s�u�ryasyeva y�a�mo.who.GEN.SG+NEG.reach.PP.NOM sun.GEN+PRT path.NOM

‘whose (course) is unreachable like the course of the sun.’(RV 1.100.2; Cardona 1970:7)

Now the gerundive, unlike the finite past participle, was wellattested from the earliest Vedic texts onwards and the changes inthe case-marking of its ‘agent’ (the person under an obligation tocarry out the action) are well documented. This ‘agent’ had threepossible encodings: dative, genitive and instrumental, but the dativewas already by the time of Vedic prose being replaced by thegenitive (Macdonell [1916] 1958:330, Speijer 1886 [1993]:63). Thetwo remaining possibilities are illustrated in (30) by means of hu- ‘tooffer, sacrifice’.


(30) a. na+u asya+anyad+hotavyam �as�ıt pr�an: �a�t.

NEG+PRT 3SG.GEN+other.N+offer.GVE be.3SG.IMPF breath.ABL‘Es gab nichts, das von ihm hatte geopfert werden konnen, alsden Odem.’(‘There was nothing he could offer but his breath.’) (MS 1.9.3;Oertel [1939] 1994:1163)

b. tasm�at sam�anatra tis: t:hat�a hotavyam.therefore same.place standing.INS offer.GVE‘Deshalb ist von einem auf einem Flecke stehenbleibenden zu giessen.’ (‘Therefore a person should offer standing inone place.’) (TS 3.1.2.3; Delbruck 1888:399; Oertel [1939] 1994:1163)

c. anyatra+ �ıks:am�an: ena hotavyam.elsewhere+looking.INS offer.GVE‘One looking away should make the offering.’ (MS 4.6.9; Oertel[1939] 1994:1163)

In the case of the gerundive Oertel [1939] 1994:1111) noted a 4:1predominance of the instrumental over the genitive (72 instrumentalsagainst 17 genitives) whereas, in the case of the past participle, he hadobserved a 4:1 predominance of the genitive over the instrumental.His numbers for the two categories suggest that, while with thegerundive instrumental-marking was well established with the pastparticiple this was not yet so – always provided that what happenedin the syntax of these two categories represents one and the sametargeted development towards unambiguous coding of agent role.Note that both categories start out with an oblique-marked nounphrase which encodes a human referent. However, while in the caseof the gerundive this referent was under an obligation to see the eventthrough, in the case of the past participle it represented a possessorendowed with a modicum of control. Both categories are initiallymodal – deontic modality in the case of the gerundive, epistemicmodality in the case of the past participle (provided the proposedevidential reading is accepted) – but both will lose their modal statusat which time their human referent will have become a mere agentappropriately marked by the instrumental.

3.6. Evidentiality in the Old Indic grammatical system

While section 5 looks at evidentiality from a cross-linguisticperspective the present section is concerned with showing thatevidentiality as a modal subsystem formed an integral part of the


categorial system of the Indian grammarians. P�an:ini had postulatedtwo contrasting categories, paroks:e (‘beyond [the reach of] the eye’)and aparoks:e (‘not beyond [the reach of] the eye’), the formercomprising unwitnessed and the latter witnessed events. Subdivi-ding the Old Indic past tenses on this basis, he assigned the(inherited, synthetic) perfect to the paroks:e, ‘as its use was restrictedto such facts as have not been witnessed by the speaker’ (Speijer[1886] 1993:247, Subrahmanyam 1999:281). Aorist and imperfecton the other hand he classed as aparoks:e, on the grounds that theywere employed to encode ‘past facts which are within the compassof the speaker’s experience’. Aorist and imperfect would in additionbe chosen when the source of the evidence was of no concern. Thatmakes the perfect a modally marked form while ‘the imperfect isalways and everywhere used both of past facts which are within thecompass of the speaker’s experience, and those which are not’(Speijer [1886] 1993:248–9).

Speijer noted that these rules were observed ‘in the practice ofgood authors’, who tended to avoid first person perfect forms inparticular, the argument being that actions carried out by Self canin principle not be unwitnessed except under such unusualcircumstances as drunkenness or dreaming. But this constraintwould have applied only in the later language (Speijer [1886]1993:250) while in the Rigveda at any rate, first person perfectforms appear not to behave differently from first person aoristand imperfect forms (Job 1995). But perhaps all this concentra-tion on first person forms may have focused attention onto arather narrow issue (see 5.3, where it is shown that first personevidentials are perfectly possible). What matters at this stage isthe fact that past participle predicates do not appear to have beenincluded in the evidentiality system. Speijer said ([1886] 1993:255)that since the past participle performed the same role as the aorist(both encoding past events which have current relevance) it mustneeds represent the younger idiom, which ruled after the demiseof the aorist. But then he did not associate the form withmodality.

The following section adduces further support for the hypothe-sis that it is the genitive rather than the instrumental agent thatretains the state of affairs inherited from Indo-Iranian. I will also


show that the ‘correct’ derivation of the possessive agent ispossessor raising and, in section 5, argue for the existence of aninherent link between a raised possessor and the modality of theclause.

4. THE GENITIVE AGENT IN DIACHRONIC AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

4.1. Middle Indic: title pages,‘writing formulae’ and monumentalinscriptions

Variation between genitive and instrumental marking of the agent isalso found in some varieties of Middle Indic. Example (31) is thetitle page (colophon) of a Gandhari Prakrit version of theDharmapada (Brough 1962), (31¢ ) is a shortened version. As willbe seen from his translation, Brough analysed the clause as passiveand the clause-initial genitive phrase as an adnominal modifier. Hisreading shows that the adnominal possessive relationship is stillintegral to the structure, which is however here analysed as a pre-ergative construction with evidential meaning. Far from recordingthe personal experience of the scribe who did the copying, thecolophon is rather a legal document issued by the convent whichguarantees the authenticity of the text by naming its ‘publisher’,title, and place of publication.

(31) budha-varmasa s:aman:asaBuddha-varman.GEN monk.GENbudhan:adi-sardhavayarisaBuddhanandin-pupil.GENida dharma-padasa postakathis.NOM Dharmapada.GEN manuscript.NOM

dharmuyan:e likhida arani.Dharmodyana.LOC write.PP.NOM park.LOC

‘This manuscript of Dharmapada belonging to the sraman:aBuddhavarma, pupil of Buddhanandin, has been written inthe Dharmody�a�na in the forest.’ (Brough 1962:117).

(310) Buddhavarmasa ida postaka likhida.‘Buddhavarman has written this manuscript.’


Similar formulae have recently been discovered in documents datedto the first century A.D., which constitute the very earliest actualmanuscripts to have been preserved in any Indic language (Salomon1998; Wright 1999). In a number of these the past participlelihida(ga) ‘written’, sometimes preceded by sarve or sarvo ‘all’, wasfound added at the end in a hand different from that of the scribe whohad written the manuscript. According to Salomon (1998:72–5) thepurpose of these postscripts would have been to certify that thescribe had completed the task of copying the original manuscript.The original would then be taken out of circulation and storedaway in a jar (where it was discovered two millennia later). The factthat the word lihida(ga) was written in a different ductus fullysupports the argued-for evidential reading. Again, far from relatingthe scribe’s personal experience, these formulae certify that the copyis complete.

The rock inscriptions of King Asoka contain, according toAndersen (1986a), 107 past participle clauses of which 51 have anovert agent. In 35 instances this is in the form of the first personsingular pronominal clitic me which I read as a genitive (see 32), in aminority it is in the instrumental as in (33).16 Of the 16 lexical agents,8 are in the genitive as in (34), and 8 in the instrumental as in (35).Andersen suggests that in these inscriptions the genitive-markedagent formed part of an ergative clause and represented oldinformation whereas the instrumental-marked type formed part ofa passive clause and represented new information. The textualevidence does not however appear to support this claim. Thedistribution of the two cases could rather be lexically governed,genitive coding going with non-action (dative-subject) verbs andinstrumental-coding with transitive-causative verbs (Bubenik1998:138, J.C.Wright, p.c.). But either way there remain inconsis-tencies and it may be just as likely that we witness here the gradualreplacement of the genitive by the instrumental. Much like thecolophons the inscriptions may be read as authoritative statements,issued this time by the king, who bears the responsibility but would

16 Andersen considered me to be ambiguous between genitive and instrumentalbecause its distribution appears to correspond to the combined distribution ofgenitive and instrumental with lexical noun phrases.


not have carried out the various enterprises himself nor would hehave personally witnessed their progress.

(32) sad:uvı�sativas�abhisitena me iyam: dham: malipi likh�apit�a.six.twenty.yearsconsecrated.INS 1SG this.NOM edict.NOM write.CAUS.PP.NOM

‘Sechsundzwanzig Jahre nach der Weihe ist diese Dhamma-Inschrift von mirveranlasst worden geschrieben zu werden.’ (‘This Dhamma inscription wascaused to be written by me twenty-six years after the consecration.’) (PE.I.B;Andersen 1986a:84)?‘I wrote this inscription twenty-six years after my consecration.’

(33) se mamay�a ha+evam: kat:e.this.NOM.M I.INS PRT+PRT make.PP.NOM.M‘Daher ist durch mich folgendes geschaffen worden.’ (‘Thefollowing has therefore been created by me.’) (RE.V.C;Andersen 1986a:83)?‘I have therefore created this.’

(34) savat�a dev�anam: piyas�a piyadasine l�ajineeverywhere [name]GEN [name]GEN king.GENduve cikis�a kat:�a.two cures.NOM make.PP.NOM

‘Uberall richtete Konig D.P. (die folgenden) zweiHeilbehandlungen ein.’(‘King D.P. installed the two treat-ments everywhere.’) (RE.II.A; Andersen 1986a:81)

(35) iyam: dham: malipi dev�anam: piyenathis.NOM dharma.inscription.NOM [name].INS

piyadasin�a l�ajin�a� likh�apit�a[name].INS king.INS write.CAUS.PP.NOM

‘Diese Dhamma-Inschrift ist vom Konig D.P.veranlaßtgeschrieben zu werden.’ (‘This dhamma inscription wascaused to be written by King D.P.’) (RE.I.A; Andersen1986a:82)?‘King D.P. has written this inscription.’

The so-called Niya documents, first analysed by Burrow (1937; seeWright 1998) and lately by Jamison (2000), record a Prakrit of thethird century A.D. Burrow noted that, although this dialect ‘differsfrom all other varieties of Prakrit preserved, in the degree to which


its inflectional system has decayed and altered . . . the changes areactually found to occur over the rest of the Indo-Aryan field at alater date’ (1937:56–7).17 The documents include ergative structuresas well as a new past tense paradigm based on the past participle(1sg ditemi, 2sg ditesi, 3sg dita), which as a rule takes a morpho-logically unmarked subject (1937:50).

Jamison (2000) found that the agent of the past participle borethe unmarked (‘absolutive’) case in the context of a non-humandirect object as in (36a) and the instrumental in the context of ahuman direct object as in (36b). Instrumental-marking howeveralso occurred ‘unnecessarily’ (that is to say with an inanimateobject) in certain formulaic expressions such as royal pronounce-ments (37a) and title pages (38). In (37), (a) has what would in thegiven context appear to be a non-modal ergative construction withthe agent in the instrumental and verb agreement with the O actant,(b) the innovative post-ergative form with a morphologicallyunmarked subject which determines verb agreement. (38) showstwo different versions of the ergative construction: the plain pastparticiple with instrumental agent in (a), the enlarged past participlewith genitive agent in (b). In addition to these relatively pureconstructions there are however also mixed patterns. Some clauseshave genitive and instrumental forms side by side doing the samejob, and some have the new post-ergative finite verb with anoblique-marked agent. Jamison says that the new post-ergative

17 ‘‘The instrumental tends to be confused with the nominative accusative. Thisprocess is closely associated with the development of the past participle into an activepast tense; tena dita ‘given by him’, began to be felt as active ‘he gave’, and finally thenominative was used as well, se dita. This is exactly the same state of affairs as occursin many of the modern languages. . . . Of course these constructions correspondexactly to the ordinary Sanskrit passive constructions, but there is no doubt that theyare translated as active because (1) exactly the same state of affairs is found inmodern languages such as Torwali, where the construction with the agentive ¼instrumental is translated as active, (2) in the vast majority of cases the past participlein -ta is construed with the nominative where it must be active, (3) the instrumental isused as the subject of the present tense, (4) in practically all definitely passiveconstructions, i.e. with participles in -taga and with gerundives, the genitive, not theinstrumental, is used to express the agent. As a result of the development sketchedabove, the instrumental is confused with the nominative in all positions, and since thenominative is not distinguished from the accusative also with the accusative.’’(1937:56–7).


morphology predominates in the account books. It would appearthat all the examples, irrespective of their morphology, are non-modal past tense clauses. (The numbers following the Prakrit textrefer to the edition of the Niya documents by Boyer et al., employedby both Burrow and Jamison. The unmarked case is left unglossed.)

(36) a. kam: ci aspa nida.Kamci horse lead.PP‘Kamci took a horse.’ (545; Jamison 2000:72)

b. tatigena dajha picavida.Tatiga INS slave hand.over.PP‘Tatiga handed over a slave.’/‘A slave was handed over byT.’ (506; Jamison 2000:73)

(37) a. maya maharayena mam: nusa 1 prasavida dita.I.INS great.king.INS man 1 grant.PP give.PP‘By me, the great king, one man has been granted.’ (355;Jamison 2000:74)?‘I, the Great King, have granted one man.’

b. aham: maharaya manusa didemi.I great.king man give.1SG.PAST‘I, the great king, gave a man.’ (136; Jamison 2000:75 N.38)

(38) a. lyihida maya raja divira sramam: na dha �mapriyena.write.PP I.INS royal scribe monk Dhamapriya.INS

‘(This document) was written by me, the royal scribe,the monk Dhamapriya.’ (575; Jamison 2000:74)?‘I, the royal scribe . . ., have written (this document).’

b. lihidaga mahi divira vugacasa.write.PP I.GEN scribe Vugaca.GEN‘Written by me, the scribe Vugaca.’ (507; Jamison2000:74 N.36)?‘I, the scribe Vugaca, have written this.’

While as an indicator of change the distribution of genitive andinstrumental is inconclusive it has been seen that, of the languagevarieties reviewed, Sanskrit is alone in having the instrumental casein all instances. That it is Sanskrit that has innovated is suggested


also by its form of the stereotypical opening formula of Buddhistsutras, where the instrumental may�a replaces the clitic me.

(39) a. evam me sutam. (Pali)that.N 1sg hear.PP.N

b. evam may�a srutam. (Sanskrit)that.N I.INS hear.PP.N‘Thus have I heard’ (Brough 1986:63)

4.2. Comparative-historical evidence from Old Iranian

The genitive agent has a direct correspondence in Old Iranian,where the passive derivation of the construction has found a seriouscontender in Benveniste’s analysis which relates the Old Persian(pre-?)ergative construction in (6), here repeated as (40c) to ‘otherpossessive expressions’ with a genitive phrase in clause-initialposition. It will be seen that in (40a) the genitive phrase functions asan adnominal possessor, in (40b) as the possessor of a predicativepossessive expression, and in (40c) as the ‘possessive agent’, thesyntactic context of this latter precluding it from having the clause-initial position. As Benveniste saw it, the possessor in (40c) hadacquired agent status through becoming ‘the owner of the accom-plishment’ expressed in the predicate (1966:200), that is to say hesaw the transition from possessive expression to perfect in semanticterms without proposing an explicit diachronic mechanism.18

(40) a. man�a pit�aI.GEN father.NOM

‘my father’ (Benveniste 1966:179)b. kanb�ujiyahy�a br�at�a. . . �aha.

Cambyses.GEN brother.NOM was‘Cambyses had a brother.’ (Benveniste 1966:179)

c. ima tya man�a krtam.this.N what.N I.GEN do.PP.N‘That which I have done’ (Benveniste 1966:177)

18 ‘(Le parfait . . .) C’est une forme ou la notion d’etat, associee a celle depossession, est mise au compte de l’auteur de l’action’, . . . ‘le parfait presente l’auteurcomme possesseur de l’accomplissement’.


As shown in (41), all three Old Persian expressions have directsyntactic correspondences in early Old Indic so that, in the absenceof evidence to the contrary, these constructions may be assumed togo back to Indo-Iranian.

(41) a. r�ajnah: purus:ah:king.GEN man.NOM

‘the king’s man’ (Speijer 1896:82)b. manor. . . r:s:abha �asa.

Manu.GEN. . . bull.NOM was‘Manu had a bull.’ (Macdonell 1958:320)

c. hat�a� ı�ndrasya satravah: .smash.PP.NOM.PL Indra.GEN enemy.NOM.PL(i) ‘Indra’s enemies are/have been beaten’; (ii) ‘Indra hasbeaten his enemies’ (RV 10.155.4)

Benveniste’s strongest argument in favour of his ‘possessive’ analysisis the existence of a structural parallelism between transitive perfectsand possessive predications found in quite a number of languages(Benveniste 1952, Allen 1964). This parallelism obtains irrespectiveof whether the auxiliary in question is HAVE, as in Romance andGermanic or BE, as in Armenian and Old Persian. The data suggestthat ergativity results when BE is employed, and Allen (1964:342)perceptively included the past perfective of present-day Indiclanguages (see 1d above) among the BE-perfects.

(42) a. J’ai lu le livre. (French)I have read.PP the book‘I read/have read the book.’

b. J’ai un frere.I have a brother‘I have a brother.’

(43) a. tya man�a krtam (Old Persian)what.N I.GEN do.PP.N‘that which I have done’

b. kanb�ujiyahy�a br�at�a �aha.Cambyses.GEN brother.NOM was‘Cambyses had a brother.’


(44) a. nora teseal �e. (Armenian)he.GEN see.PP is‘He has seen (it).’

b. nora t�un �e.he.GEN house is‘He has a house.’

The state of affairs in Avestan mirrors that in Old Persian. Asillustrated in (45), here too the genitive is employed in the encodingof adnominal and predicative possession as well as in the ergativeconstruction (Reichelt 1909:2x36).19

(45) a. mana damiI.GEN house.LOC

‘in my house’ (Y.1.25; Reichelt 1909:290)b. kahy�a ah�ı ?

who.GEN you.are‘Wem gehorst du zu?’ (‘Whose are you?’/‘To whom doyou belong?’) (Y.29.1; Reichelt 1909:288)

c. yezica h�e anya aVa syaoðna fravarsta . . .when.and 3SG other.N.PL evil.N.PL deed.NPL PV.act.PP.N.PL‘Und wenn von ihm andere Ubeltaten begangen (wordensind) . . .’ (‘And if any other evil deeds have beencommitted by him . . .’) (V.3.21; Reichelt 1909:329)‘And if he has committed any other evil deeds . . .’

Although Benveniste did not say so explicitly, it is clear that he musthave interpreted the agentive genitive phrase of (40c) as an actant ofBE (asdidAndersen (1991:98)), BEandHAVEbeingassumed tohaveidentical actancy structure while differing in the way they allocatesubject role. In the case ofHAVE,which is syntactically transitive, it isthe locative actant which has subject role and takes the nominativecase,whereas in the caseofBE this role falls to themost neutral actant,O (Benveniste 1960, Vincent 1982, Den Dikken 1997); see Table 3.

19 Reichelt (1909:241) speaks of the ‘Dativ der beteiligtenPerson’ in connectionwiththe past participle.But of his four examples two employ clitics, whichdonot distinguishgenitive and dative, and the other two are certainly not agentive. Elsewhere (1909:259)he interprets the genitive phrase with a past participle as the subjective genitive.


There is wide agreement among linguists that in Romance and inGermanic the HAVE perfect of the transitive verb resulted from thereanalysis of a structure which had a non-finite reduced participleclause embedded under main verb HAVE, as in He has [[goods[stolen]].This ‘small clause’ complement contains a noun phrase andthe resultative verbal adjective (the etymological source of the pastparticiple)which, in the earlier language, agreedwith it. The reanalysisresulting in the dynamic perfect He [has stolen] goods would havebeen set in motion by a pragmatically based inference which took theunexpressed agent of the embedded verb as being co-referential withthe locative argument of HAVE (Vincent 1982:84 for Romance,Abraham1998 forGermanic).Apersonwhowasnot himself awitnessto the event would have had circumstantial evidence which led him toequate the two roles. The initial outcome of the reanalysis would be anevidential perfect with theO actant shared by both verbs and acting asa ‘hinge’ (Vincent) between the two predicates; see Table 4.

As illustrated inTable 4, a corresponding reanalysis can in principlebe construed for BE. The point of departure would be a possessiveexpression of the form *Indrasya [[satravo [hat�a�s]]] santi ‘Indra has(the) enemies smashed’. Through a process of reanalysis whichparallels that of the HAVE perfect, the locative/possessor would, forpragmatic reasons, become equated with the agent of the lexical verbwhich underlies the past participle. The outcome would be theevidential perfect of (19): *Indrasya satravo [hat�a�s (santi)] ‘Indra hassmashed the enemies’, with optional deletion of the auxiliary.

While this derivation is on the face of it attractive, it fails toaccount for the fact that the genitive agent is not confined to formscontaining the auxiliary BE and cannot therefore be considered anactant of it (see 6.1 and 5.3). The alternative analysis on the otherhand which is being proposed here and which treats the genitive

HAVE BE

OO LOCLOCSEMANTIC ROLES:

SYNTACTIC ROLES: SUBJECT SUBJECT

NOM NOMACC OBLIQUECASE:

Table 3


agent as a raised adnominal possessor20 seems well supported notonly cross-linguistically but also in the context of evidentiality.

5. POSSESSOR RAISING AND EVIDENTIALITY

5.1. Possessor raising

Cross-linguistically, especially in the case of inalienable possession, ahuman ‘owner’ can inmany languages be encoded either adnominallyor at clause level. As illustrated in (46–7), it is possible to consider thetwo alternative encodings to be related by a syntactic process whichraises the adnominal possessor out of its noun phrase and promotes itto clause level, where it is then assimilated into the actancy structure ofthe verb (see Shibatani 1994 for references to earlier literature). Thusin (46), from Acehnese, while in (a) the first person pronoun forms a

HAVE

LOC

LOC=POSSESSOR

THEME

THEME

AGENT

he goods Ø

Ø sátravah´ índrasya

han- ‘strike’ BE

AGENT

STEAL

Table 4

20 A connection between the adnominal possessor and the possessive agent hadlong been noted. Thus Macdonell ([1916]1958:321), like Delbruck before him(1888:153) considered the genitive used with the past participle to be a possessivegenitive ‘felt to be the agent’, but he did not explicitly relate the two roles.


noun phrase with the preceding noun, in (b) it is the subject of theclause. Similarly in (47), fromGerman, while the possessor in (a) is inthe form of an attributive possessive adjective, in (b) the correspond-ing personal pronoun is a constituent at clause level.

(46) a. seunang ate lon. (Acehnese)happy liver 1SG‘I am happy.’ (lit. ‘My liver is happy.’)

b. lon seunang-ate.1SG happy-liver‘I am happy.’ (Van Valin & La Polla 1997:258)

(47) a. Sie wascht seine Haare einmal in der Woche. (German)she washes his hair once in the week

b. Sie wascht ihm die Haare einmal in der Woche.she washes he.DAT the hair once in the week‘She washes his hair once a week.’ (Shibatani 1994:273)

The so-called ‘adversative passive’ of Japanese illustrated in (48a)looks like a classic case of possessor raising, which in many respectsit is. It will be seen that this clause has an initial constituent which isnot an actant of the intransitive verb ‘to cry’. The most naturalinterpretation would postulate that the clause-initial noun phraseforms a possessive relationship with the single actant, ‘baby’, of theverb. However, the fact that this is not the only possibleinterpretation is seen from (48b), in which an overt possessorphrase has been inserted which has the effect of cancelling anypresumed possessive relationship between speaker and baby.

(48) a. Boku-wa akatyan-ni hito ban zyuu nak-are-ta.I-TOP baby-DAT one night through cry-PASS-PAST‘I had the/my baby cry on me all night.’ [Literally, ‘I was cried by thebaby all night.’]

b. Boku-wa tonari-no akatyan-ni hito ban zyuu nak-are-ta.I-TOP neighbour-GEN baby-DAT one night through cry-PASS-PAST‘I had the neighbour’s baby cry on me all night.’[Literally, ‘I was cried by the neighbour’s baby all night’] (Shibatani1994:473).

Shibatani uses (48b) to demonstrate that postulating a syntacticprocess of possessor raising is plainly inadequate (1994:473). He


argues that all that is required for the utterance to be correctlyinterpreted is that the baby be pragmatically relevant (in the presentcase, be within earshot). The decisive factor is thus not possession,and possessor raising is too restrictive a device as it fails to capture allthe possible readings of an utterance such as (48a). Now while thisargument is well accepted it would nevertheless appear to be the casethat prototypically the clause-initial constituent is anchored in asemantic-pragmatic relationship of adnominal possession and that suchreadings as physical contact, spatial proximity etc. constitute exten-sions of this possessive prototype (see Nedjalkov & Jaxontov 1983).

It will be seen in 5.3 below that, like the adversative passive ofJapanese, the ‘‘ergative construction’’ of German has the effect ofcreating an extra actant. While in Japanese the extra actant isgenerally taken to encode the person (adversely) affected by theverbal action its role in German appears to go beyond this toinclude agent-like properties. Note that in both languages the extraactant is in the clause-initial subject position but it is not acanonical subject.21 In the case of Japanese, Shibatani and Pardeshi(2001) analyse it as the subject of an ‘outer’ (higher) clause while inthe case of German (see 5.3) I have attributed it to possessorraising. The formal (and semantic) similarity of these constructionsto the pre-ergative construction of Indo-Iranian is clear to seealthough there is the difference that in Indo-Iranian the raisedpossessor has come to fill the (previously empty) agent slot of thetransitive verb, thereby creating an ergative structure. The crucialfactor which separates Sanskrit from Japanese and German thusresides in the transitive reanalysis of the pre-ergative clause whichattributes subject status to the agent.

5.2. The grammatical coding of evidentiality

It is obligatory in a wide range of languages to give formalexpression to ‘the source of the information in the proposition’

21 Iwasaki characterises the adversative passive as valency-increasing, the extraactant being pragmatically relevant to the scene depicted by the rest of the sentence(2002:131–5). He also makes the point that if the extra actant forms a possessiverelationship with one of the actants this entails that the depicted event, or state ofaffairs, will impact more forcefully on the referent of the extra actant.


(Willett 1988:53) by specifying in the grammar the nature of theevidence on which this is based, whether the event was directlywitnessed, inferred from circumstances, or based on hearsay(‘reported’). An evidentiality system which treats direct experienceas grammatically unmarked while employing the so-called eviden-tial form to record mediated experience is shared by a cluster oflanguages in south-eastern Europe and western Asia (Johanson &Utas 2000). In these it is the evidential, often formally related to aresultative or perfect (Comrie 1976:110, Bybee and Dahl 1989,Boeder 2000:310) which indicates that the utterance in question isbased on hearsay or inference (Lazard 1999:91) while the unmarkedform encodes the event as directly witnessed or as evidentiallyneutral. Palmer (1986:51) subsumes evidentiality under epistemicmodality, the modal marker indicating the degree of commitmentby the speaker to what he says. However, for those working onTurkic and Iranian languages, ‘evidentials in themselves do notimply any nuance of doubt or presumption’ (Lazard 1999:96, withreferences). Rather, while ‘ordinary’, non-evidential forms ‘statefacts purely and simply, . . . evidential forms point to the speaker’sbecoming aware of the facts’, whether through hearsay or throughinference (Lazard 2001:362). For Lazard the evidential is accord-ingly a mediatif, expressing the notion ‘as I see’, ‘as it appears’(Lazard 1999:96); for Johanson it is, in the same spirit, an‘indirective’ (2000:60ff.), the event being encoded indirectly, ‘byreference to its reception by a conscious subject, this receiver beingeither the speaker or one of the participants in the event. . . .. Thebasic indirective meaning is the reception of an impression thatcreates awareness of a situation’ (2000:65). It will be seen that theVedic (and Middle Indic) pre-ergative construction has exactly thesame interpretation.

The basic distinction made within the evidential is betweeninferred and reported events although some recognise an addi-tional ‘(ad)mirative’, which records surprise. Johanson notes thatin East Old Turkic the evidential form was employed tosummarise ‘events often complex and discontinuous and outsidea narrative chain’, as in (49), which is highly reminiscent of theroyal proclamations set in stone by the Great Kings Asoka andDarius (see 4 above).


(49) _Elig _et-mis menrealm.ACC organise-EVID.PERF I‘I have organized the realm.’ (Johanson 2000:66)

As far as Indo-Iranian is concerned perhaps the most revealingcomparison is with South Caucasian (Kartvelian) languages.22

Thus in Georgian, while the aorist represents the neutralunmarked encoding of past events, the perfect is employed‘when the speaker is referring to a past action which he did nothimself witness but assumes took place either on the basis ofsome present result (e.g. wet ground suggests the past occurrenceof rain) or because someone has told him that it did’ (Hewitt1995:259). Equally in Svan the evidential is employed when thespeaker wants to stress the fact that he did not himself witnessthe event in question. Here too the main types of indirectevidence are ‘reported’ and ‘inferred’. In the latter, inferences aredrawn from observable results and from general regularitiesencountered in the world (Sumbatova 1999:6–7) while themirative conveys new surprising information, as in (50), utteredby the speaker on hearing the addressee play the guitar.Sumbatova suggests (1999:14) that both the syntactic form andthe meaning of the Svan evidential reflect its origin in aresultative.

(50) isgowd xoc�amd oxwtorax gitara-zi liswmeyour.TRFM good teach.EVID3sgS.3plO guitar-up play.MASDAR.NOM23

‘You (apparently) have been well taught to play the guitar!’ (Sumbatova1999:11)

Within Indo-Iranian a distinctive evidential form of the verb isattested in a number of present-day Iranian languages includingFarsi and Tajik as a derivative of the perfect (Lazard 1999, 2000,

22 In both Georgian and Svan, the present-tense system has the subject in thenominative and the direct object in the dative. In the aorist system the subject is inthe ergative case and the direct object in the nominative. In the perfect system thesubject is in the dative and the direct object in the nominative (i.e., this encodingbeing the ‘inverse’ of the present). It is this latter pattern which is associated withevidentiality (Job 1995, Sumbatova 1999).

23 TRFM ¼ transformative; MASDAR ¼verbal noun, gerund.


Utas 2000). Provided that the reinterpretation of the so-calledinvolitive (Wijayawardhana et al. 1995) that I am suggesting iscorrect (see 5.4 below), a distinct evidential form is present also inthe grammar of at least one present-day Indic language, namelycolloquial Sinhala. In the paired clauses in (51) for example, (a)represents the basic neutral encoding and (b) the (marked)evidential, which records the event indirectly, as inferred fromappearances or results. It will be seen that the agent of theevidential is oblique-marked, by contrast with the unmarked agentof the neutral form. (52) illustrates the fact that, unlike transitives,unaccusatives lack the A-form. (The data and translations arefrom Wijayawardhana et al. 1995:118ff.; the morphologicallyunmarked nominative (¼inanimate accusative) case is unglossed.The unmarked verb form is indicated by A, the marked form byP. My alternative readings based on the revised interpretation heresuggested are enclosed between square brackets. See 5.4 forfurther data.)

(51) (a) mam e geyak hæduva.I house.INDEF build.PAST.A‘I built a house.’

(b) vaQuva-atin gee hond eÇ e hæduna.builder-INS house nicely build.PAST.P(On seeing a new house:) ‘The house has come up nicelyat the hand of the builder.’[‘(Look), the builder has built the house well.’]

(52) kooppe væÇuna.cup fall.PAST.P‘The cup fell.’

5.3. The German ‘‘ergative construction’’

It will be seen that the German clause type which I term the‘‘ergative construction’’ bears a striking resemblance to the pre-ergative construction of Vedic. Unlike the Indo-Iranian construc-tion however which occurs with transitive verbs, the Germanconstruction is confined to non-agentive intransitive verbs with


patient-like subjects.24 Some of these verbs are unaccusatives such as‘fall’ while others are ergative (ambitransitive) verbs such as ‘burn’,‘break’, which can also have transitive construction, the S of theintransitive being coreferential with the O of the transitive. We arethus here concerned with both lexical ergativity and ergative-likemorphosyntax. I believe that the kind of formal and semantic-pragmatic analysis which I am putting forward here for German(where I have access to my own and other native speakers’judgments) can throw light also onVedic, where insufficient languageknowledge prevents me from developing comparable arguments.

The German ‘‘ergative construction’’, as illustrated in (53), ischaracterised by a clause-initial dative phrase which, I argue, forms asemantic-pragmatic (rather than a strictly syntactic)25 relationship ofpossession with the nominative phrase. I will on the strength of thisrelationship analyse it as a raised possessor and assign it to the verb asan extra actant. Being topical and invariably human, this nounphrasegives the construction a semblance of transitivity although the verbitself is intransitive, anbrennen being a member of the class ofunaccusative verbs which encode ‘spontaneous’ processes taken tooccur by themselves, without the intervention of an agent, see (54).

(53) Mir sind die Kartoffeln angebrannt.I.DAT are the potatoes PV.burn.PP‘I have been and gone and burned the potatoes.’

(54) Die Kartoffeln sind angebrannt.The potatoes are PV.burn.PP‘The potatoes are/have got burnt.’

24 This construction is very common in every-day speech: Mir sind — die Augenzugefallen, die Apfel verfault, die Kartoffeln erfroren, die Brotchen verbrannt; Mir istdas Feuer/der Kaffee/die Geduld ausgegangen, der Bleistift abgebrochen, die Milchubergekocht, der Kanarienvogel davongeflogen etc. (I’ve gone and let my eyelidsdroop, the apples go rotten, the potatoes freeze, the rolls burn; I’ve let the fire go out,I’ve run out of coffee/of patience, I have broken the point of my pencil, I have let themilk boil over, the canary escape). See Wegener 1985:200–1 for a list of otherexamples.

25 Note that in colloquial southern German it is the dative which figures inadnominal possessive expressions: dem sein Haus (he.DAT his house) ‘his house’, derMarie ihr Mann (the.DAT Mary her man) ‘Mary’s husband’. The genitive is notused.


Considering first the pragmatics, (53) would typically be uttered bysome-one who, on entering the kitchen, is met with smoke and asmell of burning. Given this unexpected state of affairs the clausecan be read as a ‘mirative’, expressing surprise, which may bereinforced by an exclamation such as Du liebe Zeit (‘oh dear’). Onthe other hand, from her knowledge of what had gone before, theperson involved will have inferred what must have happenedalthough she had not actually witnessed the event itself nor had shedeliberately set it in motion. She had put potatoes on the stove toboil but had either failed to add enough water, or to reduce theheat, or had for some reason or other left the potatoes unattendedfor longer than she had intended, or had simply forgotten aboutthem. The event recorded in (53) is accordingly not directlywitnessed but is based on an inference drawn from backgroundknowledge and from the situation encountered at the time ofspeaking.

Syntactically this so-called ‘‘ergative construction’’ has threeconstituents: (i) the dative phrase, typically clause-initial andhuman, and very commonly a personal pronoun; (ii) a noun phrasein the nominative which is definite (its referent being contextuallyidentifiable) and which has the role of syntactic subject; (iii) the pastparticiple of an intransitive verb of the unaccusative or ergativeclass. The construction clearly has ergative-like morphosyntax tothe extent that what is semantically the object has subject-markingwhereas the unwitting human instigator is oblique-marked. It is ofcourse not ergative in the same way that the Hindi and Pashtoconstructions are, since the dative phrase is only the psychologicaland not the syntactic subject and the verb is not transitive (hencemy use of inverted commas when I refer to this construction).

Semantically the construction is generally interpreted as encodingan accidental action involitively carried out by the referent of thedative phrase. The semantic role of the dative phrase itself isdisputed in the literature.26 Zifonun et al. (1997:1342ff.) interpret itas a beneficiary (or its semantic converse) although its referent is atthe same time also seen as unintentionally having caused the event,or at least as not having prevented it from occurring, the extent of

26 I am grateful to Martin Durrell for references and discussion.


the referent’s involvement being dependent on the semantics of thelexical verb. Eisenberg (1994:298ff.) includes it among the ‘free’ (i.e.,non-actant) datives, as the person to whom the object in question isentrusted. Wegener (1985) explores the possibility of a Benveniste-based possessive analysis which treats the dative phrase as an actantof main-verb-turned-auxiliary sein ‘to be’, only to reject this on thegrounds that the syntactic pattern is not confined to the perfect. Apresent tense clause such as (55) is equally well-formed andpragmatically appropriate. Ascribing the dative phrase to thelexical verb (by deriving it, in somewhat ad hoc fashion, from anabstract higher predicate HAPPEN) she notes that it does havecertain limited subject properties such as clause-initial position andcontrol of subject-oriented adverbs (Wegener 1985: 314ff.).

As for the nominative phrase its characteristic definiteness wouldappear to have gone generally unnoticed although in Wegener’sextensive list of illustrative examples it invariably has the definitearticle. In the present analysis this definiteness finds a naturalexplanation in the fact that the nominative phrase has an impliedpossessive modifier which is coreferential with the dative phrase. Inthe case of body-part referents as in (56) this possessive relationshipis inherent and inalienable. (Note that with body-parts Germantends to employ the definite article rather than an overt possessive.)Elsewhere, in e.g. (53) and (57), it is pragmatically based andcaptures as wide and varied a range of meanings as does thepossessive pronoun, my book standing for the book in my hand, orthe book I am in the process of reading, or the book I havewritten.27

The verb form of the construction encodes a past event whichretains current relevance at the time of speaking, a property whichis common to the present tense and (the perfect formed from) thepast participle. Nedjalkov & Jaxontov note (1988:52) that in general

27 Even where the indefinite article is found the referent is still identifiable, in thiscase as a seam on an item of clothing being worn by the person at the time ofspeaking.

Mir ist eine Naht geplatztI.DAT is a seam burst.PP‘I have burst a seam.’


the occurrence of the bare predicative past participle is severelyconstrained, Das Buch ist geschrieben (‘The book is [in the state ofhaving being] written’) being possible only ‘when the speaker hasrecently completed the action and when the (expected) result is inevidence’ (emphasis mine, ThB.).

Taking all three constituents together it is clear that the form ofthe construction directly reflects its anchoring in the speech act:both nominal constituents are contextually identifiable and the verbrefers to the here-and-now of the situation. The construction willthus in the first instance record the realisation of a state of affairstogether with some idea of the event that would have led to it. Butfrom there it is but a small step to a sense of frustration on the partof the person for not having prevented the event, and from there tothe notion of accidentally having caused it. In the case of (56) forinstance the person knows that she could have avoided theunpleasant sensation by exercising the control she is expected tohave over her own body (Neumann 1996:775), and in (53) and (57)she has indirectly caused the event, or could at least have preventedit from occurring. My German informants28 agree on this point.‘Sie ist schuldig’ (‘She is at fault’), as one of them put it with regardto (53). And (53) is indeed semantically and pragmatically more orless identical with the permissive causative in (58), in which theperson ‘allowing’ the event to happen through not preventing it, isencoded as the syntactic subject. The events in question are thus notuncontrollable (as is sometimes claimed) but it is rather the casethat the person in question has failed to exercise proper control.

(55) (Du liebe Zeit!) Mir brennen die/meine Kartoffeln an!(o dear) I.DAT burn.3PL.PRES the/my pototoes PV

‘(O dear) I am burning my potatoes’

(56) Mir ist der Arm eingeschlafen.I.DAT is the arm PV.fall.asleep.PP‘My arm has gone to sleep.’/‘I’ve got pins and needles in myarm.’

28 I am grateful to Brigitte Konig, Gabriele Faust, Renate Sohnen-Thieme andGertrud Fritz for their assessments of a spectrum of my German sentences.


(57) Uns ist die Wasserleitung eingefroren.We.DAT is the water.pipe PV.freeze.PP‘Our pipes have frozen up.’/‘We’ve let our pipes freeze up.’

(58) (Du liebe Zeit!) Ich habe die Kartoffeln anbrennen lassen!(o dear) I have the potatoes PV.burn.INF let.PP‘(O dear) I’ve gone and burned the potatoes.’ (lit. ‘I have letthe potatoes burn.’)

In having responsibility and control, however ineffective, attributedto the referent of its clause-initial human constituent, the German‘‘ergative construction’’ contrasts with both the locative expressionin (59), in which the human referent is not attributed any respon-sibility for the event, and with the simple one-place construction in(54), which is neutral. (53) and (59) on the other hand share theproperty that they are interpretable only in the context of theimmediate here-and-now of the speech act, the permitted tenses beingperfect and present. The semantic range of the German constructionmay thus best be captured by taking the evidential reading as basicand primary, and by developing the further readings of it via thenotion of control. This will in the first instance be the possessor’scontrol over the possessed object and secondly, with the possessorfunctioning at clause (rather than phrase) level, the control lodged inthe referent of the dative phrase over the event depicted in the clause.As a result, although the dative phrase is clearly not the syntacticsubject (see 60) its human reference and topicality neverthelessbestow on the ‘‘ergative’’ clause some semblance of transitivity.

(59) Bei dir ist etwas angebrannt!chez you is something PV.burn.PP‘You’ve got something burning here!’

(60) Mir sind die Kartoffeln angebrannt und *(ø) habe schnelletwas anderes gekocht.‘I burned the potatoes and (ø) quickly cooked something else.’

In the case of an ergative verb such as ‘break’, which has bothintransitive and transitive (causative) construction as illustrated in


(61), the ‘‘ergative’’ construction could become attributed to thetransitive, contrasting with the transitive HAVE perfect, as illustra-ted in (62). Once such an association were made the ‘‘ergative’’construction could then come to be interpreted as the markedcounterpart of the HAVE-perfect generally and extend its domainby analogy to all transitive verbs. This did not happen in Germanbut precisely this pathway is being postulated for Vedic (see 6.2 and7), where it is suggested that the ancestor of the ergative constructiondeveloped in the context of the intransitive rather than the transitiveform of the ergative verb.

(61) a. Der Krug ist zerbrochen.the jug is PV.break.PP‘The jug is/has broken.’

b. Ich habe den Krug zerbrochen.I have the jug PV.break.PP‘I have broken the jug.’

(62) a. Ich habe den Krug (mit Absicht) zerbrochen(, weil er angeschlagen war).‘I (deliberately) broke the jug (because it was chipped).’

b. Mir ist der blaue Krug zerbrochen.‘I have (accidentally) broken the blue jug.’

5.4. The Sinhala evidentiality system: a possible blue-print forVedic?As suggested (in 3 above) it is conceivable that the lexical distributionof the pre-ergative construction in Vedic could reflect an evidentialitysystem not unlike that of present-day colloquial Sinhala – alwaysprovided that my reinterpretation of the Sinhala involitive form(Wijayawardhana et al. 1995) as an evidential is found acceptable.Sinhala grammarians have labelled this form ‘involitive’ and similar(Reynolds 1980:101ff.) because it is employed among other things toencode actions which, as in (68b) can be accidental or unintentional.However, as I argued in the case of German, the notion ‘accidentalaction’ presupposes retrospective awareness of what must havehappened. The inferential reading would therefore seem to be morebasic than the ‘accidental action’ one.


Colloquial Sinhala has two morphologically distinct sets of verbforms (Geiger 1900:69–73, Wijayawardhana et al. 1995:111). Thefirst (here labelled ‘A’) is morphologically unmarked and associatedwith action verbs; its subject is in the unmarked nominative case.The second set of forms (here labelled ‘P’) is morphologicallymarked (by vowel fronting etc.); it is the only form with non-actionverbs and is the marked form with action verbs, whose agent is inthe dative, instrumental or accusative or in the form of apostpositional phrase. It will be seen that unaccusative verbs (63)only have the P-form, as do verbs encoding physical and mentalstates (64), which take a ‘dative-subject’ (see Klaiman 1980, Masica1991:346–56, Shibatani &Pardeshi 2001 for dative-subject struc-tures in other present-day Indic languages). Verbs of physical andmental perception (65) employ the P-form with dative-subject toencode intuitive perceptions whereas deliberate acts of listening,watching, and conscious thinking take the nominative-markedsubject and the A-form of the verb.

Ergative verbs (66) have three possibilities: the A-form withunmarked subject encodes a deliberate action carried out by anagent, the P-verb with unmarked inanimate subject encodes a‘spontaneous’ event which precludes an agent, and the P-form withoblique-marked agent encodes what is described as an ‘involitive’ oraccidental action. The first two possibilities are illustrated below ina dialogue fragment at (a), the involitive at (b). The same threestructural possibilities are found with transitive-only verbs, (67–8),with which the agentless P-form has the immediate here-and-nowreference of an evidential. ‘Two houses have come up here’ is thespeaker’s reaction to an altered state of affairs uttered ‘on scene’.The same is the case with P-form and oblique-marked agent which,as a rule, requires a judgmental adverb (‘nicely’, ‘well’), showingthat it encodes the speaker’s assessment of the (assumed) eventwhich led to the perceived state of affairs: ‘The builder has made agood job of the house’. This evidential reading is thus clearly visiblein the case of at least some action verbs and is here considered to bemore basic than the purported involitive reading found with certainothers (68b). Intransitive action verbs are illustrated in (80). [In theexamples below the morphologically unmarked nominative case isleft unglossed; the morphologically unmarked verb forms are


glossed ‘A’, the morphologically marked forms ‘P’, as is the practicein Wijayawardhana et al.1995, which is the source of all the dataand translations; my own alternative interpretations are precededby a question mark.29

(63) lam eya(-v e) gang eÇ e væÇuna.child(-ACC) river.DAT fall.PAST.P‘The child fell into the river.’ (W 124)

(64) maÇ e riden eva.I.DAT hurt.PRES.P‘I am in pain.’ (W 128)

(65) mam e oonækamin æhuve nææI deliberately listen.PAST.A notnamut eegollo kiy en edee maÇ e æhuna.but they tell.PRES.PART.THING I.DAT hear.PAST.P‘I was not listening but I heard what they said.’ (W 126f.)

(66) a. banQa, mokak d e ee binde?Banda what Q that break.PAST.A‘Banda, what was it that you broke?’binde nææ, noona.break.PAST.A NEG Madam‘I didn’t break anything, Madam.’ehenan mokak d e ee sadd eyak æhune?if so what Q that noise.INDEF hear.PAST.P‘Then what was the noise I heard?’viiduruak binduna, noona.glass.INDEF break.PAST.P Madam‘A glass broke/has got broken, Madam.’ (W 106–7after Coates 1972:471)

29 According to Wijayawardhana et al. (1995) the differentiated case-markingpattern of the Sinhala involitive reflects degrees of control on the part of its referent(instrumental � full control; accusative � no control; dative � some control, andaffectedness).The genitive is treated in the grammars as adnominal only but itremains to be seen whether it can operate at clause level. Possessive expressions of the‘I have . . .’ type employ the dative.


b. lam eya-atin kooppe binduna.child-INS cup break.PAST.P‘The child (accidentally) broke the cup.’ [for instance whiletrying to wash it] (W 106–7, 113)

(67) a. mam e geyak hæduva.I house.INDEF build.PAST.A‘I built a house.’

b. giy e maase et en e geval dekak hæduna.last month there houses two build.PAST.P‘Last month two houses got built there.’ [that is twohouses have come up on the site. The speaker does notknow who built them.]

c. gee ikm en eÇ e hæduna.house soon build.PAST.P‘The house has got built quickly.’ [that is, the buildinghas come up in a very short time]

d. vaQuva-atin gee hond eÇ e hæduna.builder-INS house nicely build.PAST.P‘The house has come up nicely at the hand of the builder.’(W.118f.)?‘The builder has built the house well.’

(68) a. miniha vaha kææva.man poison eat.PAST.A‘The man took poison.’

b. lam eyaÇ e vaha kævuna.child.DAT poison eat.PAST.P‘The child (accidentally) swallowed poison.’ (W 120)?‘The child has (will have) swallowed something poisonous.’

(69) a. lam eya hond eÇ e naÇ en eva.child nicely dance.PRES.A‘The little girl dances well.’ [because she is trying hard orhas talent]

b. lam eyaÇ e næÇen eva.child.DAT dance.PRES.P‘The little girl is dancing willy-nilly.’[because, with themusic, she cannot help herself] (W. 123)


These examples illustrate the fact that what is here considered at leastby origin an evidential form (‘P’) is distributed over the entirespectrumof lexical verbs. If a comparable system had existed inVedicthis would explain the role of the pre-ergative construction withtransitive verbs (see 3) butwould at the same time raise the question asto what was the situation in Vedic as regards intransitive verbs of theunaccusative and ergative classes. Justification for this enquiry areencouraged by the observations made on German and Pashto wherethe evidential-involitive is found only with non-action intransitives.

6. RAISED POSSESSOR AND NON-AGENTIVE INTRANSITIVE VERB IN VEDIC

The verbs in this section have non-agentive O-like subjects andencode spontaneous events. They are either unaccusatives such as‘fall’ or ergatives such as ‘break’, ‘bend’, ‘split’, ‘burn’, which can beconstrued intransitively and transitively. It will be seen that theseverbs can indeed occur with a genitive phrase capable of beinginterpreted as a raised possessor, both in the present tense and withthe predicative past participle. On the basis of their distinct formalcharacteristics I distinguish two verb sets, those in which theintransitive is characterised by a distinctive stem in the present tenseand those in which intransitive and transitive have a tense-aspectgoverned distribution.

6.1. Non-agentive intransitives with-ya-present

The present tense of these verbs is characterised by a ya-suffix andmiddle-voice endings, both being formal characteristics of intransi-tivity. In the case of the unaccusatives, which exclude the interventionof an agent the word accent is invariably on the root and the presenthas an anticausative reading. In the remainder the accent issometimes on the root and sometimes on the suffix. Although theaccented -ya-suffix had by the time of Sanskrit become the canonicalmarker of the passive voice, in Vedic there was no systematicassociation between accentuation and semantic function.Whether anindividual -ya-present had a passive or an anticausative reading wasaccordingly an empirical matter (Kulikov (1998b; 2000; 2001:272–338, 533–42). Those in (70–72) are all anticausatives. It will be seen


that their genitive phrase can be construed either adnominally orwiththe verb. However, in view of the fact that in these examples itcorrelateswith a canonical subject in the other clause I amanalysing itas a constituent at clause level which, like the German dative phrase,encodes the person involved in and responsible for the event. It will beseen that, again as in German, the genitive phrase is topical but doesnot have subject status. The fact that the examples record handed-down knowledge (‘report’) rather than direct experience is beingtaken as justification for the identification of the construction as anevidential. (I have added my own German translations which renderthe Vedic structure more directly than the English ones.)

(70) yasya gr�a�v�a+api s�ıryatewho.GEN pressing.stone+PRT break.3SG.PRESpasubhir vyr:dhyate.cattle.INS PV (‘asunder’) thrive.3SG.PRES‘The one whose pressing stone breaks is deprived of cattle.’(KS 35.16:62.1–2; Kulikov 2001:333)‘Wem der/sein Preßstein zerbricht, dem mißrat auch das/seinVieh.’ (‘He who breaks his pressing-stone also fails with hiscattle.’)

(71) vı� v�a� es: a prajay�a pasubhirPV (asunder) PRT this.NOM.M offspring.INS cattle.INS

r:dhyate yasya gharmo vid�ıryate.thrive.3SG.PRES who.GEN pot.NOM PV.crack.3SG.PRES‘Verily, the one whose gharma-vessel cracks is deprived ofoffspring and cattle.’ (SB 14.3.2.1; Kulikov 2001:299)‘Wem der/sein Topf zerspringt, dem mißrat sein Nachwuchsund Vieh.’

(72) atha yasya kap�a�lam bhidyetaand who.GEN pot.n break.3SGPRES.OPT

tat sam: dadhy�at.it.N PV put.3SGPRES.OPT

‘And if someone’s dish would break, he should mend it.’(MS 1.4.13:62.10; Kulikov 2001:310)‘Und wenn wem der Topf zerbricht, soll er ihn reparieren.’


These demonstrably anticausative (i.e., non-passive)-ya-presentsprovide clear evidence that, in the case of these particular verbs it isthe intransitive which is construed with the genitive ‘‘agent’’ to formwhat is here considered an evidential present. The correspondingpast participles are employed adjectivally (‘broken’, ‘split’, ‘full’,etc.) and the majority is formed by means of the rarer -na- ratherthan the usual -ta- suffix, a fact which may perhaps be seen asindicative of their intransitive ‘spontaneous’ reading. According toSpeijer ([1886] 1993:281), past participles in -na- ‘never convey atransitive active meaning’: bhinna - means ‘split by itself’ and not‘split by some-body’. I have unfortunately not found examples ofthese with a genitive ‘‘agent’’.

6.2. Non-agentive intransitives with tense-aspect based split-causa-tivity30

The verbs of this set differ from the former in not having distincttransitive and intransitive paradigms. Kulikov (1999) describesthem as having ‘split causativity’ on the grounds that their present-tense active forms are most likely to operate in transitive-causativefashion whereas their perfect, and frequently also their presentmiddle forms have anticausative readings. The transitivity status ofthe past participle has not so far been studied but its adjectival uses,with meanings such as ‘grown’, ‘rotten’, ‘decayed’, ‘swollen’ etc.suggest the intransitive ‘spontaneous’ rather than the agentivereading.

There are some occurrences in the Rigveda of the past participleof these verbs in combination with a genitive phrase. The followingtwo verbs in particular, sri- ‘to (cause to) lie on/lean on’ and tan- ‘tostretch’, have well attested past participles which, on a number ofoccasions, do co-occur with a clause-initial genitive phrase or with aclitic pronoun which can be interpreted as a raised possessor. It willbe seen that the clauses in (73) and (74) have properties charac-teristic of the evidential: they make reference to the immediate

30 The verbs of this group include vr:dh- ‘to (cause to) grow’, j�r: - ‘to (cause to)grow old, decay’, nam- ‘to (cause to) bend’, pı� - ‘to (cause to) swell’, sri- ‘to (cause to)rest on’, tan- ‘to (cause to) stretch’.


here-and-now of the utterance and their two noun phrases form apossessive relationship. The genitive phrase (or clitic) can accord-ingly be interpreted as a raised possessor and an extra actant of theverb.

According to the dictionaries the first verb, sri-, present activesrayati [¼ sray-a-ti, not a -ya- present)], middle srayate, PP srita-,passive (-ya- present) sr ı�yate and sr ı�yate: ‘to (cause to) lie on’, ‘to(cause to) be fixed on’; (‘sich) lehnen an, (sich) stutzen auf’, hastransitive and intransitive readings. Kulikov (2001:202ff.), whileinterpreting its accented -ya-present as passive, notes that the-i- aorist and perfect middle have intransitive readings (2001, note641). The past participle srita- occurs 26 times in the Rigveda. Theclauses in (73) have a second-position second person clitic thereferent of which is the addressee of the hymn. Their past participlewould appear to be intransitive but the interpretation is by nomeans clear-cut as can be seen from the cited translations.

(a) is from a hymn addressed to Agni, whose smoke representsthe ketuh: (‘flag, banner, token of recognition’) of the sacrifice.Structurally divi sritah: abhavat (with the imperfect form of thedynamic auxiliary bh�u- ‘become’) may be analysed as a singlepredicate, but abhavat may also be seen as the main predicate withsritah: as a subordinate non-finite participle. The clitic te may inprinciple be construed with dh�umah: as has been done by Geldner, orwith ketuh: , as has been done by Macdonell, or else as a clause-levelconstituent. The latter analysis is favoured by myself, on account ofthe relation of inalienable possession that exists between smoke andfire. The event itself is inferred from its visible result, namely thespreading of the smoke in the sky. Given the intrinsic nature of fire,the event does not constitute a volitional act. (The sacrificial fire islit by the priest.) Semantically and pragmatically, therefore, anevidential meaning based on the intransitive-anticausative readingwith raised possessor would seem appropriate.

In (b) the referent of the clitic is ghr:ta- ‘melted butter’, oftenemployed as a metaphor for fertility. It might seem best here toconstrue the clitic adnominally with dh�a�man although it is justpossible to interpret ghr:ta- as Fertility, inseparably linked with ‘her’creation, in which case the clitic might be interpretable as a raisedpossessor.


(73) a. dh�umas te ketur abhavad divı�smoke.NOM 2SG flag.NOM became sky.LOC

sritah: .lean.PP.NOM.M‘The smoke, thy banner, (was raised¼) arose to heaven.’(RV 5.11.3; Macdonell 1958:329–30)‘Smoke became thy banner that reached the sky.’(Macdonell 1960:101)‘Dein Rauch ward das Banner, das sich gen Himmelreckt’ (‘Your smoke became the flag which stretches intothe sky.’) (Geldner)?‘Dir ist/hat sich der Rauch als (dein) Banner in denHimmel gerichtet.’ OR ‘Dir ist dein Rauch, in den Himmelgerichtet, zum Banner geworden.’ (?‘You have had yoursmoke cling to the sky as your banner.’ OR ‘You have hadyour smoke, clinging to the sky, become your banner.’)

b. dh�a�man te vı�svam: bhuvanam adhi sritam.realm.LOC 2SG all.N world.N PV cling.PP.NOM.N‘In thy ordinance all the world is set [rests].’ (RV 4.58.11;Jamison 1990:14)‘Auf dein Wesen/auf deine Grundlage/auf dich alsGrundlage ist die ganze Welt gestellt.’(‘The whole worldis placed upon your being/upon your foundation/uponyou as its foundation.’) (Geldner)??‘You have caused all your creature to abide in your realm.’

With the verb tan- ‘to stretch, spread, extend’; ‘(sich) dehnen,spannen, strecken’) the intransitive non-passive uses predominate inthe perfect whereas the active voice of the present tense hastransitive-causative meaning, as illustrated in (74a,b).

(74) a. d�ur�a�t s�u�ryo na socı�s:a tat�ana.from.afar sun.NOM like flame.INS stretch.3SG.PERF‘From afar he [Agni] has extended, like the sun, with[his] flame.’ (RV 6.12.1)

b. aham rudr�a�ya dhanur �a� tanomi.I.NOM Rudra.DAT bow.ACC PV stretch.3SG.PRES‘I stretch the bow for Rudra.’ (RV 10.125.6; Kulikov 1999:27)


The -ya-present t�ayate occurs once only in the Rigveda (see (g)below). It is, however, common in post-Rigvedic prose, where ithas the secondary meaning ‘to perform a rite’. The primarymeaning ‘to stretch’ (intransitive) is found especially with certainpreverbs (Kulikov 2001:77–81). The past participle tata- occurs30 times in the Rigveda, with and without preverb, bothpredicatively and attributively (most frequently qualifying tantuh:‘warp thread’ and pavıtram ‘strainer’). It is a resultative,describing the object as being in a stretched state as the resultof having been stretched by someone or as having stretched itself.In (c-g) I am interpreting the past participle as having thespontaneous reading.

(c) is uttered by a man who was thrown into a deep well andwhose field of vision was confined to the ‘Seven Stars’ (thePleiades), a constellation which according to one interpretationincludes an ancestor of the man. The umbilical cord is a body-part. Since in this context an agent seems out of place thisstrongly argues for interpreting the clitic as a clause-levelpossessor phrase.

In (d–f) the subject of the past participle is pavıtram ‘strainer’,an implement employed in the sacrifice for the purpose ofpurifying the soma, which is poured through it. In (d) theaddressee of the hymn and referent of the clitic is Soma,the divine Br�ahman:aspatih: . In (e) the strainer image is applied tothe rays of the sun, in (f) to the glow of the fire. While thestrainer in (d) is manipulated by the priest, so that an adnominal,or just possibly a benefactive reading would seem appropriate, (e)and (f) make reference to natural events with which the forces ofsun and fire are causally associated without however beingvolitional agents. This suggests the spontaneous-anticausativereading of the verb as in (a). If on the other hand Sun and Firewere seen as free agents this would entail the conflation ofpossessor and agent which must have occurred with prototypicaltransitive verbs. The potential structural ambiguity found hereprovides the conditions for the reanalysis which interpretes thegenitive phrase as the transitive agent.

In (g), the first verse of a hymn, the poet speaks of his work inlanguage which is thought to derive from the craft of weaving


(Geldner31, Kulikov 2001:77). Two forms of the verb tan- are herefound in the same line, the past participle tatam and the -ya-present form t�ayate, which is the only finite -ya- present formattested for this verb in the Rigveda. Being the main verb of itsclause, t�ayate is unaccented. On the evidence of the later languageit is generally interpreted as a passive, a reading which alsoappears to find support in the fact that the clause which followshas a passive form in the corresponding position. If, however, itwere to be interpreted as a -ya-present ‘with variable accent’ itcould just possibly be assigned an intransitive reading with araised possessor, implying that the poet’s art is a spontaneoushappening and does not involve deliberate agency. The broadmeaning of the line appears reasonably clear from the context: ‘Asyou can see, I have my ‘work’ (?weaving¼ritual act) at the readyand here I go again’.

c. tatra me n�a�bhir �a�tata.there 1sg navel PV.stretch.PP.NOM.F‘Bis dahin reicht meine Nabelschnur.’ (‘My umbilical cord reaches till there.’)(RV 1.105.9; Geldner)?‘Bis dorthin ist/hat sich mir die Nabelschnur gespannt.’

d. pavı�tram te vı�tatam br�ahman: aspate.strainer.N 2SG PV.stretch.PP.N Br�a�hman: aspati.VOC

‘Deine Seihe ist ausgespannt, o Br�a�hman: aspati.’ (‘Yourstrainer is spread out, B.’) (RV 9.83.1; Geldner)

e. tapos pavı�tram vı�tatam divas padeglowing.GEN strainer.N PV.stretch.PP.N sky.GEN foot-print.LOC

socanto asya tantavo vy asthiran.flaming.NOM.PL 3SG.GEN threads.NOM.PL PV stand.3PL.AOR.MID

‘Die Seihe des Gluhenden ist an des Himmels Ort ausgespannt; seineflammenden Faden haben sich ausgebreitet.’ (‘The strainer of the glowingone is stretched out in the place of heaven; his flaming threads have spreadout.’) (RV 9.83.2; Geldner)?‘Der Sonne hat sich die/ihre Seihe am Himmel ausgebreitet. Ihr sind diegluhenden Faden aufgegangen.’ (‘The sun had its strainer spread in the sky.It had its glowing threads come up.’)

31 ’Der Dichter versucht sich nicht zum ersten Mal in seinem Fache. Er hat schonfruher denselben Faden gesponnen. Das Bild ist vom Weben genommen, mit dem dieDichtung wie jedes rituelle Werk ofters verglichen wird.’


f. yat te32 pavı�tram arcı�s:ywhich.N 2SG strainer.N flame.LOC

agne vı�tatam antar �a�

Agni.VOC PV.spread.PP.N inside PRT

brahma tena punihi nah: .prayer.N that.INS cleanse.IMP 1PL‘Die Seihe, die in deiner Flamme, o Agni, ausgespannt ist, mit der lautereunsere feierliche Rede.’ (‘Purify our prayer with the strainer spread out in yourflame, o Agni’.) (RV 9.67.23; Geldner);?‘Deine Seihe, die sich dir ausgespannt hat. . .’ (‘. . .the strainer which you havespread . . .’)

g. tatam: me apas tad u t�ayatespan.PP.N 1SG work. that.N and stretch.3SG.PRES.PASSpunah: sv�a�dis: t:h�a dh�ıtı�r ucath�aya sasyate.again sweetest.NOM.F thought.NOM hymn.DAT utter.3SGPASS‘My work is done and it is being done again.’ (RV 1.110.1; Macdonell 1958:329)‘Mein Werk ward (fruher) ausgefuhrt, es wird aufs neue ausgefuhrt: die sußesteDichtung wird zu einem Lobgedicht vorgetragen.’ (‘My work was carried out(earlier) and is being carried out again: the sweetest poetry is being sung as ahymn of praise.’) (Geldner)‘Getan ist mein Werk, und es wird wiederum getan.’ (Delbruck 1888:394)‘My [poetic] work is performed, and it is being performed again.’ (Kulikov2001:79)??‘Mir hat sich meine Weberei gestrafft und sie ist noch straff.’ (??‘I have seen myweaving tense and it is still tense.’)

Although some of these examples may seem more pertinent thanothers it would appear to be the case that a sequence such as tapospavıtram vıtatam as in (73e) can potentially have three possibleanalyses. The possessor is either adnominal, or it is raised, formingan ‘extra’ actant of the intransitive verb, or else it has merged withthe transitive agent. It is at this point that the construction becomesavailable to prototypical transitive verbs, where as a modallymarked evidential it contrasts with a transitive past tense clausewith nominative subject and finite verb.

The data examined in this section show that a raised possessor isfound also with non-agentive intransitive verbs depicting sponta-neous events. It is possible that the construction may in fact haveoriginated with this verb type. Through the intermediary of ergativeverbs capable of being construed both intransitively and transitivelythe construction would have spread to transitive-only verbs, thepossessor filling the empty agent slot. Verbs such as sri- and tan-,

32 According to J.C.Wright (p.c.) the three-fold metric division of the verse (hererepresented graphically) favours the adnominal reading of the clitic.


which can in principle have either intransitive-spontaneous ortransitive-agentive construction could thus have created the condi-tions for the analogical spread of the structure. This admittedlyspeculative sequence of events finds some support from the factthat, with these intransitive verbs, genitive ‘‘agents’’ are notconfined to late books of the Rigveda as was the case with thetransitive past participles.

The surmised origin of the construction with non-agentiveintransitives has some cross-linguistic support. We have seen thatin German the ‘‘ergative construction’’ can only be formed fromnon-agentive intransitive verbs, that in Sinhala the evidential-involitive of the transitive verb is formally identical with theunmarked form of non-agentive intransitive verbs, and that inPashto, where the intransitive and the transitive of ergativeverbs are formally distinct it is only the intransitive which mayco-occur with the so-called accidental agent (Khattak 1988:127).This latter is illustrated in (75), where (a) illustrates the simpleresultative adjective, (b) the intransitive perfective, (c) theintransitive perfective with ‘accidental agent’, and (d) thecorresponding transitive. It will be seen that the verb in (c) ismorphologically identified as intransitive and that its ‘accidentalagent’ is oblique-marked and followed by the postposition na (acombination which also marks locative, experiencer and benefi-ciary actants).

(75) a. da-piala mata-da.this-cup broken-is‘This cup is broken.’

b. da-piala mataS ewida.this-cup break.3SGF.PAST.PFV‘This cup broke [by itself].’

c. Zalmi-na piala mataSwaZalme.OBL-na cup break.3SGF.PAST.PFV‘Zalme (accidentally) broke the cup.’ (Khattak 1988:128)

d. peso piala matakracat.OBL cup break.3sgF.PAST.PFV‘The cat broke the cup.’ (Khattak 1988:204)


7. INDO-IRANIAN

In this paper I have attempted to develop an alternative to thederivation of the ergative construction from a passive by postu-lating as its source a modally marked evidential of Indo-Iranianage. My analysis follows naturally from the fact that the nominalconstituents of this postulated source construction are referentiallyidentifiable and that its past participle predicate, by origin a verbaladjective which encodes the state resulting from a preceding actionor event, refers to the here-and-now of the speech act. Thegrammatical coding thus reflects the fact that either a state of affairswas being identified as the result of an unwitnessed event inferredfrom the circumstantial evidence, or it identifies the message as‘reported’ which, in the present context, means handed down in thereligious tradition. I have shown that an evidential category formedpart of the grammatical system of the Indian grammarians,although only the inherited perfect was explicitly identified as anevidential form. Evidentials with comparable semantic propertiesare found in certain present-day Iranian languages, a fact which hasbeen ascribed to influence from neighbouring Turkic languages,and probably also in colloquial Sinhala. On the basis of theirmorphology, however, it would seem that these are likely to beinnovations rather than retentions.

I have argued that, on both internal and comparative evidence,the canonical marker of the agent of the pre-ergative sourceconstruction was the genitive. It has been seen that in Vedic thisgenitive-marked agent was licensed by an adnominal possessiverelationship, which made it analysable as a possessive modifierraised out of its noun phrase and promoted to clause level as an‘extra’ actant of the verb. As a result the control inherent in thepossessor would extend beyond the possessee to the event depictedin the pre-ergative clause, bestowing agentlike properties on the‘possessive agent’.

The reconstruction of a genitive agent is also supported bysystematic syntactic correspondences between Old Indic (Vedic andMiddle Indic, but not Sanskrit) and Old Iranian (Old Persian andperhaps Avestan). On the Iranian side, in view of the limited data Ihave examined, I have left open the question as to whether the


construction still had evidential status or had already become aplain past tense clause as was the case in Sanskrit. The highlyrestricted and repetitive Old Persian data (Skjaervø 1985:219) seeminconclusive,33 but in a case such as (76) it might possibly be arguedthat the imperfect forms the unmarked counterpart of the stillevidential perfect.

(76) h�atiy xsay�ars�a xs�ayahiya vazraka tya man�a krtam

says Xerxes.NOM king.NOM great.NOM what.N I.GEN do.PP.Nid�a ut�a tyamaiy apataram krtam ava visamhere and what.N+1sg far.off do.PP.N that.N all.Nvasn�a auramazd�aha akunavam.will.INS Ahuramazda.INS do.1sgIMPF

‘Says Xerxes the Great King: what I did here and what I did afar, all that did Ithrough the will of Ahuramazda.’ (Cardona 1970:2)

According to the present hypothesis, the Sanskrit ergativeconstruction must be the result of a fundamental reanalysis whichled syntactically to its transitivisation and semantically to the loss ofits earlier modal meaning. The first step would have been the loss ofthe possessive relationship between the two noun phrases, possiblyunder the influence of the gerundive, which was the otherO-oriented modal form subsequently to lose its modality. Nolonger motivated by the adnominal possessive relationship, thegenitive case would have become a poor indicator of agenthood.Replacement of the agentive genitive by the instrumental wouldreduce syntactic ambiguity and would at the same time contributeto unambiguous agent marking (without however implying passivevoice!). For the instrumental was clearly becoming the canonicalmarker of those agents for which the nominative was not available,such as the agent of the gerundive and the ‘intermediate agent’ (orcausee) of the new causative being formed from transitive verbs(Hock 1981, 1990, 1991b).

The original genitive-marking nevertheless had a crucial effect onthe further development of the construction for, deriving from anadnominal possessor which precedes its head, the ‘possessive agent’preceded the O actant and was accordingly in subject position. This

33 I owe to Nicholas Sims-Williams the reference to Skjaervø 1985, who interpretsthe construction as a ‘new perfect’ contrasting with the (past tense) imperfect.


position would have facilitated, if not actually triggered, thetransitive reanalysis of the construction in Sanskrit. And theattribution of subject role to the agent is clearly the single mostimportant innovation which characterises the ergative constructionof Sanskrit by comparison with the pre-ergative construction ofVedic.

I have finally suggested, on the basis of distributional data fromVedic and (admittedly rather limited) cross-linguistic evidence, thatthe pre-ergative construction is likely to have originated with non-agentive intransitive (unaccusative and ergative) verbs. It wouldthen have spread to transitive verbs through the intermediary ofergatives such as ‘break’, which could enter both intransitive-spontaneous and transitive-causative constructions, the latterallowing the possessor to be identified with the transitive agent.Example (77) recalls the three possible analyses of the genitivephrase in the context of an ergative verb. (In the translations I havereplaced the epithet ‘the glowing one’ by its referent, the Sun, andhave added German renderings since their structure reflects moreclosely the Vedic original.) The evidential of (77iii) would in Vediccontrast with the old-style transitive clause with nominative subjectand finite verb of (78) while in later language states it was to replaceit.

(77) tapos pavı�tram vı�tatam.glowing.GEN strainer.N PV.stretch.PP.N(i) Adnominal: ‘Die Seihe der Sonne ist ausgebreitet.’ (‘TheSun’s strainer is spread out.’)(ii) Intransitive with ‘extra’ actant: ‘Der Sonne hat sich dieSeihe ausgebreitet’, cf.with an unaccusative verb ‘Der Sonneist die Seihe aufgegangen’ (‘The Sun had its strainer spread.’)(iii) Transitive, ‘extra’ actant merged with agent: ‘[Sieh!] DieSonne hat ihre Seihe ausgebreitet.’ (‘[Behold!] The Sun hasspread its strainer.’)

(78) vı� hot�a pavı�tram atanuta.PV PRIEST.NOM strainer.ACC stretch.3SG.IMPF

‘The priest spread the strainer.’


The proposed analysis has opened up a diachronic pathway fromthe syntax of lexical ergatives to the ergative morphosyntax of thepast tense/perfective aspect of Indic and Iranian languages.34 Itremains of course to be seen whether the postulated evidentialreading of the source construction will receive support from corpus-based work.

Lippitts EndMott Street, High BeachLoughton IG10 4APEmail: [email protected]

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(NON-STANDARD) ABBREVIATIONS

ERG, ergative; EVID, evidential; GER, gerund/converb; GVE, gerundive/futureparticiple; IMPF, imperfect; N, nominative/accusative singular of neuter noun; PFV,perfective aspect; PP, past participle; PV, preverb/detachable adverbial verb prefix;PRT, particle; Q, question particle; QUOT, quotative.


Historical Source of Ergativity in Indo-Iranian

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