Remarks on the Development of the Vedic Verbal System

The Project "Indo-European Case and Argument Structure in a Typological Perspective" advertises a guest talk by Eystein Dahl (University of Oslo)

This paper takes a fresh look upon some of the typologically most important patterns of development in the Vedic verbal system. In the oldest stage of Vedic, the language of the Rigveda, we find a system where aspectual distinctions play a central role. In later stages of Vedic, on the other hand, temporal remoteness distinctions substitute the original aspectual distinctions. Moreover, Early Vedic has a rich inventory of modal categories with a basically epistemic meaning, which, however, are also used to express various types of deontic modality. In later stages of Vedic the various modal categories have a more specialized set of uses so that the inventory of epistmic modal categories is reduced, whereas we find a considerable number of purely deontic modal categories with fairly specialized meanings. Relying on insights from formal semantics I examine the most important patterns of change, showing that they can be straightforwardly accounted for in terms of strengthening of pragmatic implicatures.