Non-subordinated infinitives in the Ṛgveda and Atharvaveda

Abstract

In studies of Vedic infinitives, it has not infrequently been claimed that, when they are non subordinated, Vedic infinitives can function like imperatives. For Whitney (1879: §982d), who was among the first to explicitly discuss the topic, this represented a special semantic usage of predicative infinitives. Unlike Whitney, most subsequent scholars have treated these supposedly imperatival infinitives as being not just semantically but also syntactically different from predicative infinitives. This paper argues that Whitney’s original intuition that all non-subordinated infinitives are predicative is correct; by investigating the evidence from the Ṛgveda and Atharvaveda and reconsidering traditional assumptions, this paper demonstrates that an analysis of all non subordinated infinitives as being predicative is both compatible with the synchronic evidence and diachronically plausible.