Transitive Nouns and Adjectives

This book explores the wealth of evidence from early Indo-Aryan for the existence of transitive nouns and adjectives a rare linguistic phenomenon which according to some categorizations of word classes should not occur. John Lowe shows that most transitive nouns and adjectives attested in<br>early Indo-Aryan cannot be analysed as a type of non-finite verb category but must be acknowledged as a distinct constructional type. The volume provides a detailed introduction to transitivity (verbal and adpositional) the categories of agent and action noun and to early Indo-Aryan. Four periods<br>of early Indo-Aryan are selected for study: Rigvedic Sanskrit the earliest Indo-Aryan; Vedic Prose a slightly later form of Sanskrit; Epic Sanskrit a form of Sanskrit close to the standardized 'Classical' Sanskrit; and Pali the early Middle Indo-Aryan language of the Buddhist scriptures. John<br>Lowe shows that while each linguistic stage is different there are shared features of transitive nouns and adjectives which apply throughout the history of early Indo-Aryan. The data is set in the wider historical context from Proto-Indo-European to Modern Indo-Aryan and a formal linguistic<br>analysis of transitive nouns and adjectives is provided in the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar.<br>