The Vedic Aorist and Diachronic Typological Changes in the Old-Indo-Aryan Past Tense System

In the present project I will investigate how the Vedic tense/aspect system develops through the history of the Vedic language. In the earliest attested stages of Vedic the verbal system has several traits in common with the verbal systems found in other archaic Indo-European languages, like for instance Ancient Greek, where a binary opposition between perfective and imperfective aspect is found, whereas a somewhat different system with an opposition between immediate, non-immediate and remote past is fou nd in the later stages of Vedic. An important part of this project is to pinpoint the semantic basis for this development, something which has impact on the understanding of the genesis of temporal remoteness systems, which are found in many languages in the world. I will use theoretical perspectives from formal semantics, cross-linguistically based studies of tense and aspect phenomena and recent grammaticalization research to gain new insights into the typological character of the Vedic verbal system an d into the diachronic changes in the Vedic past tense system. In this respect, the present research project has a somewhat broader theoretical perspective than many other recent contributions to Vedic Philology and represents an interdisciplinary combinat ion of two related, but distinct fields of research. The findings of this project will primarily be of interest for researchers working within the fields of Vedic Philology and General linguistics. Moreover, they will probably have significant impact on o ur understanding of the relationship between Vedic and other archaic Indo-European languages and thus of the nature of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system.