Abstract

ignate remote or historical past, the perfect being furthermore restricted to events not witnessed by the speaker.3 In the intervening stage of Vedic Sanskrit, the past tenses show a complex mix of temporal, aspectual, and discourse functions. On top of that, Rigvedic retains the injunctive, a chameleon-like category of underspecified finite verbs whose many uses partly overlap with those of the past tenses. The present study of the Rigvedic system is offered as a preliminary step towards the reconstruction and theoretical interpretation of this aspect-to-tense trajectory.