The agent and patient of -tave/ -tavai infinitives in the Atharvaveda tradition Insights from Pāṇini’s grammar

Abstract

In Vedic a dative-marked infinitive may co-occur with a dative-marked nominal interpreted as its agent or patient. This raises the question as to whether there is a direct syntactic connection between the nominal and the infinitive. Lühr (1997) and Keydana (2013) arrived at opposite answers, which shows the lack of clear diagnostics to determine the membership of the dative-marked nominal to the infinitival clause or the governing clause. In this study we show that Pāṇini offered an original answer to this selfsame question: by capitalizing on the notion of ‘co-occurrence’ between verbal bases, Pāṇini allows the dative-marked nominal to be simultaneously connected to the dative-marked infinitive and to the governing verb, thereby cutting across the boundaries between governing and infinitival clause. We show that Pāṇini’s analysis accounts for all the Ṛgveda and Atharvaveda occurrences of the dative-marked nominal plus the dative-marked infinitive.