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Part of
Perfects in Indo-European Languages and Beyond
Edited by Robert Crellin and Thomas Jügel
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 352] 2020
► pp. 245–278

Chapter 7
The synthetic perfect from Indo-Iranian to Late Vedic

ORCID logo | UiT – The Arctic University of Norway

This paper outlines the origin and development of the synthetic Perfect from Indo-Iranian, the reconstructed common ancestral stage of the Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages, to Vedic, the oldest attested stage of Old Indo-Aryan. Comparative evidence from Old Iranian, Homeric Greek and a number of other Indo-European languages shows that this morphological category ultimately originates from Proto-Indo-European. In the course of its history, the synthetic Perfect develops from a P-oriented stative construction in Indo-European, via an anterior construction in Indo-Iranian to a general past tense with an emerging indirect evidential sense in Old Indo-Aryan. The present contribution highlights the various stages of development reflected in Vedic, but it also includes reference to the Indo-Iranian prehistory of the Vedic Perfect, as well as to its demise in later stages of Indo-Aryan. The development of the Indo-Iranian Perfect indicates that anterior categories tend to be rather unstable diachronically.

Keywords: Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, stative, anterior, evidentiality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical and philological preliminaries
    • 2.1Theoretical considerations
    • 2.2Philological preliminaries
  • 3.The synthetic perfect in Indo-Iranian
    • 3.1The Proto-Indo-Iranian situation
    • 3.2Outline of the development of the synthetic Perfect in Old Iranian
  • 4.The synthetic Perfect in Old Indo-Aryan
    • 4.1The synthetic Perfect in Early Vedic
    • 4.2The synthetic Perfect in Middle Vedic
      • 4.2.1The Early Middle Vedic Perfect
      • 4.2.2The Perfect in Middle Vedic Proper
    • 4.3The synthetic Perfect in Late Vedic
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 September 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.352.07dah
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