The Vedic -ya-presents: Passives and Intransitivity in Old Indo-Aryan.

• Author: Holland, Gary B.
• Position: Book review

The Vedic -ya-presents: Passives and Intransitivity in Old Indo-Aryan. By LEONID KULIKOV. Leiden Studies in Indo-European, vol. 19. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Pp. xxix + 994.

This massive book consists of an introduction (pp. 3-35), a "Survey of Vedic -ya-presents" (pp. 39-680), a "Systematic Analysis and Classification of -ya-presents" (pp. 683-764), three appendices (pp. 767-799: post-Vedic -ya-presents, Vedic quasi-denominatives and their passives, -ya-passives), a bibliography and abbreviations (pp. 801-927), and indices (pp. 929-94).

The subject is complex in several respects: the term present is, as usual in Sanskrit grammatical literature, used for the constellation of forms made from the present stem, including the present tense, the imperfect, the injunctive, the imperative, the subjunctive, the optative, and the present participle. Further, -ya-presents are not functionally homogeneous: those with accent on the suffix and obligatory middle inflection are typically passives, while those with root accent and either active or middle inflection (traditional class IV presents) are not.

The theory of voice followed here is that of the Leningrad/St. Petersburg typological school as represented primarily by the works of Mel'cuk and Geniusiene. Kulikov substitutes the term syntactic pattern for the St. Petersburg school's diathesis to avoid ambiguity. Here the main syntactic patterns are transitive, absolute transitive (i.e., transitive verbs employed without an overt object, e.g., sing, write), and transitive-affective (i.e., transitive verbs used in the middle with a self-beneficient sense, e.g., yajate 'he performs sacrifice for himself'). Passivization is used in its usual sense, viz., the promotion of the direct object to subject position and the demotion of the agent, which appears in the instrumental (less frequently, the genitive), if at all. Agentless passive is employed to refer to passives with non-specific agents. Anticausative is used to refer to the "intransitive (non-causative) counterpart of the transitive verb in pairs like jananta suryam (RV 9.23.2) 'they generated (= gave birth to) Surya' ~ suryo ajayata (RV 10.90.13) 'Surya was born'." Reflexive is used in a narrow sense, "i.e. to refer to the syntactic pattern which maps the two semantic arguments (usually, Agent and Patient) onto one single syntactic function, the subject, as, e.g., in somah pavate 'Soma purifies himself'."

Kulikov relies heavily on the passivization...