On the syntax and semantics of the past perfect participle and gerundive in early New Indo Arian Evidence from Eastern Pahari

Abstract

AbstractThe article discusses the earliest attestations of participial tenses in early Eastern Pahari and the obligative pattern based on the gerundive. The data consist of a collection of inscriptions from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries found in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, inscriptions found in western Nepal, and early Western Pahari inscriptions found in the Chamba state of Himachal Pradesh in India. Despite the highly formulaic and repetitive language of these inscriptions, they constitute some of the earliest attestations of constructions which gave rise to contemporary ergative and obligative patterns. The two types of construction are dealt with against the background of the emerging postpositional system. The case-marking of the main arguments is analyzed and compared with other contemporary New Indo Aryan languages, and verbal forms based on the -ta participle as well as conjunctive participles that appear in the texts are investigated with regard to their control properties. The agreement patterns had already started to diverge in the earliest stages of NIA, and we can observe the transitional phase of a language in which alignment is far from stable.