The synthetic perfect from Indo-Iranian to Late Vedic

Abstract

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 stems from Proto-Indo-European. In the course of its history, the synthetic Perfect develops from a P-oriented stative construction in IndoEuropean, 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 IndoAryan. The development of the Indo-Iranian Perfect indicates that anterior categories tend to be rather unstable diachronically.