Transitive Nouns and Adjectives
Evidence from Early Indo-Aryan
Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics Series, Vol. 25

This book explores the wealth of evidence from early Indo-Aryan for the existence of transitive nouns and adjectives, a rare linguistic phenomenon which, according to some categorizations of word classes, should not occur. John Lowe shows that most transitive nouns and adjectives attested in early Indo-Aryan cannot be analysed as a type of non-finite verb category, but must be acknowledged as a distinct constructional type. The volume provides a detailed introduction to transitivity (verbal and adpositional), the categories of agent and action noun, and to early Indo-Aryan. Four periods of early Indo-Aryan are selected for study: Rigvedic Sanskrit, the earliest Indo-Aryan; Vedic Prose, a slightly later form of Sanskrit; Epic Sanskrit, a form of Sanskrit close to the standardized 'Classical' Sanskrit; and Pali, the early Middle Indo-Aryan language of the Buddhist scriptures. John Lowe shows that while each linguistic stage is different, there are shared features of transitive nouns and adjectives which apply throughout the history of early Indo-Aryan. The data is set in the wider historical context, from Proto-Indo-European to Modern Indo-Aryan, and a formal linguistic analysis of transitive nouns and adjectives is provided in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar.

John Lowe is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics at the University of Oxford. He has worked widely in the areas of Sanskrit and Indo-Iranian syntax, and formal syntax more widely. His first monograph, Participles in Rigvedic Sanskrit, was published by Oxford University Press in 2015. He has published papers in a range of linguistic and philological journals, including Language, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Journal of Linguistics, Transactions of the Philological Society, Journal of the American Oriental Society, and Indo-Iranian Journal.