The Imperative in the Rigveda.

• Author: Klein, Jared S.
• Position: Book review

The imperative in the Rigveda. By DANIEL BAUM. UTRECHT: LANDELIJKE ONDERZOEKSCHOOL TAALWETENSCHAP (LOT) (= Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics), 2006. Pp. 204.

This little book is the published form of a doctoral dissertation written under the direction of Alexander Lubotsky. It consists of chapters entitled "The Place of the Imperative in the Rigvedic Verbal System" (pp. 11-20), "The Morphology of the Imperative" (pp. 21-64), "Aorist vs. Present Imperative" (pp. 65-89), and "Index of Attested Imperative Forms in the Rigveda" (pp. 91-183). A bibliography and index of cited examples round out the volume.

After pointing out certain distributional anomalies (-is-, -sis-, and reduplicated aorists are generally prevented from forming an imperative differentiated from the injunctive; verbs like da 'give', dhd 'place', stha 'stand', and ga 'go' cannot differentiate injunctive and imperative in the second person singular of the root aorist; the imperative and injunctive do not contrast in negative clauses, where only the injunctive occurs), Baum goes on to discuss the functional distinction between imperative and optative in second-and third-person contexts and finds some tendency for the optative to be used for requests for tangible objects, while the imperative tends to signal hopes and wishes for intangibles. However, outside of the verb as 'be' the optative is quite rare in the Rigveda, yielding in frequency to the imperative by a proportion of 1:42 for seven very common verbs. Even within these figures, with the exception of a few precatives in-yds, there are no examples of second-or third-person optatives in main clauses, the only place where they could compete with imperatives; and forms such as hhavet, bhuycit, and gamydt, which appear in grammar books, are completely unattested in the Rigveda.

Baum's discussion of the morphology of the imperative takes up the individual endings of this category and discusses the relationship of the imperative to the modal aorist injunctive. In this last section he introduces a possible touchstone for deciding whether a given injunctive is modal or not: the presence of sa-fige or the particles tu and su. Although Jamison has demonstrated very clearly the correlation of sa-fige and imperative-like modality (1992), the relationship of tu and su to modality is not unfailing (Klein 1982). But the principle is a useful one and is worth retaining in future work on Rigvedic syntax. This chapter also includes...