Time, tense and aspect in early Vedic grammar : : exploring inflectional semantics in the Rigveda / / Eystein Dahl.

• Superior document: Brill's studies in Indo-European languages & linguistics, v. 5
• Author: Dahl, Eystein.
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden ;, Boston : : Brill,, 2010.
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Brill's studies in Indo-European languages & linguistics ; 5.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (xviii, 475 pages) :; illustrations
• Other title: Preliminary Material /; Introduction /; Chapter One. Situations, Times, Worlds And Contexts /; Chapter Two. Aktionsart And Morphosyntax In Early Vedic /; Chapter Three. The Present System /; Chapter Four. The Aorist System /; Chapter Five. The Perfect System /; Conclusion /; Bibliography /; Index Locorum /; General Index /
• Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
• ISBN: 1283119420; 9786613119421; 9047440501
• ISSN: 1875-6328
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Eystein Dahl.

This book takes a fresh look at the relationship between aspect, tense and mood in Early Vedic, the language of the Rigveda . Although numerous studies have examined the functional range of individual verbal categories in this language, this work is the first attempt to approach this problem from an overall, systemic perspective. With insights from formal semantics and linguistic typology, the author demonstrates that aspect represents a grammatically relevant semantic dimension on a par with tense in the Early Vedic verbal system, thereby indicating that the language has preserved an aspectual opposition similar to the one found in Homeric Greek. Apart from these general findings, the book provides a theoretical framework designed for exploring inflectional semantics in dead languages.