Eystein Dahl

Time, Tense and Aspect in Early Vedic Grammar: Exploring Inflectional Semantics in the Rigveda

Drawing on insights from formal semantics and linguistic typology, this book presents a comprehensive account of the tense/aspect/mood system in Early Vedic, the language of the Rigveda. It also outlines a theoretical framework for the study of semantics in dead languages.

Toward a formal model of semantic change: A neo-Reichenbachian approach to the development of the Vedic past tense system

Abstract This paper explores some ways in which a neo-Reichenbachian time-relational framework can be applied to diachronic data. The target language of this study is Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the sacred texts of Hinduism. The main focus of the paper concerns the evolution of the Vedic past tense system, which at the beginning of the Vedic tradition is aspect-based and later develops into a system where temporal remoteness and evidentiality distinctions determine the distribution of the past tense categories. This language therefore offers a particularly intriguing data set for exploring the diachronic relationship between aspect, proximal tense and evidentiality, a field of diachronic semantics which has only received limited attention in the research literature.

Tense and Aspect in Indo-Iranian Part 1: The Present and Aorist

The oldest attested Indo-Iranian languages, Vedic Sanskrit, Avestan and Old Persian, indicate that Proto-Indo-Iranian possessed a rich inflectional verbal system with a great variety of temporal and aspectual categories. This paper discusses the semantic properties of some of the inflectional forms belonging to two of the most central inflectional stems in the Indo-Iranian languages, the Present and Aorist which were associated with the neutral aspect and the perfective aspect, respectively. A comparison with other Indo-European languages, most notably Ancient Greek clearly shows that this morphosyntactic opposition was inherited from Proto-Indo-European.

Tense and Aspect in Indo‐Iranian Part 2: The Perfect, Futurate, Participial and Periphrastic Categories

In this paper I examine the semantic properties of the Indo-Iranian Perfect which was associated with the anterior or perfect aspect, of the simple Future, the Desiderative and Voluntative which were all associated with a futurate meaning as well as participial and periphrastic categories. In addition, I will highlight some open questions in this area.