The diachrony of ditransitives in Vedic Sanskrit

Abstract

Indo-Iranian in general and Old Indo-Aryan in particular is usually regarded as a morphosyntactically rather conservative branch of the Indo-European linguistic family. However, recent work (e.g. Cotticelli and Dahl Forthcoming) demonstrates that Early Vedic, the oldest attested variety of Old Indo-Aryan, shows a number of important innovations in its alignment system, including the establishing of a more consistently nominative-accusative agreement on finite verbs vis-à-vis Indo-Iranian, as suggested by comparative data from Avestan. Moreover, previous works (e.g. Dahl 2009, 2014a, 2014b, Forthcoming, Cotticelli and Dahl Forthcoming) have established that while Old Indo-Aryan is rather permissive towards non-canonical object realization patterns, non-canonical subject constructions are rather scarce in the language. Based on these observations, the present paper examines the diachronic behaviour of the verbal arguments in ditransitive constructions in Vedic Sanskrit.