Organized by:

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Eystein Dahl° and Beatrice Grieco* 

°UiT - The Arctic University of Norway, *Università per stranieri di Siena

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Keywords: periphrastic constructions; serial verbs; light verbs; aspect; alignment

 

Recent decades have witnessed a growing interest in different types of complex verb constructions in Indo-Aryan and in a broader cross-linguistic context (e.g., Butt 1995, 2010; Butt and Geuder 2003; Dahl 2016; Slade 2014, 2020). In this context, the notion of complex verb construction is intended to include all types of syntagmatic combinations of two (or more) predicates, including periphrastic constructions, serial verbs, light verbs, verb concatenations, etc. This workshop aims to bring together scholars working on various types of complex verb constructions in Indo-Aryan from different perspective, including synchronic, diachronic, comparative-historical, and typological contributions. While it is well-known that complex verb constructions are a characteristic feature of New Indo-Aryan languages, their attestations in the most ancient stages of the language represent a yet understudied field. Apart from well-studied constructions such as the periphrastic resultative in -tá- (e.g., Dahl 2016; Jamison 1990) or the periphrastic future (e.g., Gonda 1956; Lowe 2017; Tichy 1992), recent research has established that Old Indo-Aryan has several other types of complex verb constructions, including serial verb and light verb constructions (cf. e.g., Ittzes 2022; Yates 2014). As regards the origin and development of complex verb constructions in Indo-Aryan, many questions remain open, in particular regarding the relation between constructions found in Old Indo-Aryan and corresponding constructions in Modern Indo-Aryan and the diachronic processes leading to the emergence of complex verb constructions. The main goals of this workshop are:

• to determine the functional range of complex verb constructions in Indo-Aryan;

• to examine new and unexplored data concerning complex verb constructions from Old to Modern Indo-Aryan languages in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of the origin and historical development of such constructions;

• to identify what role, if any, loss of old inflexional categories or gaps in inflectional paradigms play in the formation of complex verb constructions;

• to establish whether and to what extent the emergence of new complex verb constructions represents a formal innovation continuing an already existing category or results in a previously unattested category;

• to explore the conditions facilitating the rise of complex verb constructions and establish whether any areas of grammar tend to attract such constructions;

• to explore the development from a predominantly synthetic system of verbal categories to a predominantly analytic system in the history of Indo-Aryan.

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Convenors:

Eystein Dahl (UiT – The Arctic University of Norway) is a historical linguist with a background in Indian Philology, Classics, and Comparative Linguistics. His work has dealt with questions relating to tense/aspect/modality in Vedic Sanskrit and on alignment and alignment change in Indo-European languages. 

 

Beatrice Grieco (Università per stranieri di Siena) is a Ph.D student in Historical Linguistics. Her main research interests are grammaticalization processes in Vedic and Late Vedic, with a particular interest in the verbal system and in the periphrastic verbal constructions.

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