The Nominal Sentence in Sanskrit and Middle Indo-Aryan.

• Author: Rocher, Ludo

The main theme of this volume is the study of the "transition of a verbal adjective from one syntactical category to another" (p. 4). Even though "this kind of development, namely the influence on the verbal system, of the use of an originally nominal form, that is, an adjective which may be equivalent to a perfect participle, ... occurs in the history of many languages" (p. 4), the author has decided to pursue the phenomenon more specifically through the history of the languages of India. Indeed, "in comparison with Slavic and other languages, the Indian branch of the Indo-European family provides the richest materials" (p. 5). In other words, this is a study, a detailed study indeed, on how Vedic and Sanskrit verbal adjectives evolved, via the Prakrits, into Hindi verbal forms: gata [right arrow] gada [right arrow] gaya [right arrow] gaya/gaya hai.

A brief "Introduction" is followed by a theoretical chapter on "The Nominal Sentence." The next chapter is devoted to "The Nominal Sentence in Vedic Sanskrit," followed by "The Nominal Sentence in Epic and Classical Sanskrit," "PPP Constructions in the Mahabharata, Ramayana and Kathasaritsagara," "The Nominal Sentence in Pali," and "Verbal and Nominal Sentences in Maharastri." The last chapter offers a general "Conclusion."

Even though Breunis' Ph.D. thesis at Utrecht, like the present volume, dealt with Sanskrit and Maharastri (Specifieke eigenschappen van analytische constructies en composita in Sanskrit and Maharastri, 1977), he obviously approaches his research topics less as an Indologist than as a comparative Indo-Europeanist, with a strong bent toward Slavic linguistics, at that. Two articles by the author, cited in the bibliography, are "Sur la phrase nominale en Russe" (1983), and "L'analyse logique de la phrase du type mozno kurit" (1988). A Western Indologist cannot help being struck by the fact that the Hindi grammars Breunis relies on are, in addition to Halding's (Leipzig 1967), those by Porizka (Prague 1963) and Dymsic (Moscow 1969). In the bibliography (p. 214) S. K. Chatterji's Indo-Aryan and Hindi includes a reference to Liperovskij's Russian translation (Moscow 1977).

The introduction places the author's research squarely in the context of historical and structural linguistics: "The proposed investigation of the nominal sentence in Sanskrit and Middle Indo-Aryan (Prakrit) is an application of the structuralist linguistic theory of the Polish scholar J. Kurylowicz (1895-1978)...