Differential subject marking in Old Indo-Iranian (original) (raw)

The paper deals with the variation -ās ~ -āsas in the nominative plural of masculine a-stems of Vedic Sanskrit. A preliminary analysis of the evidence displayed in the Rig-Veda suggests that the longer variant form, Vedic -āsas, was originally used for marking a contextually high degree of agentivity in low agentivity nouns. Since a variation similar to Vedic -ās ~ -āsas is also found in Iranian as well as in the distantly related Germanic languages, the origin of the unexpected doubling in the nominative plural of masculine a-stems may be attributed already to Proto-Indo-European. It is argued that the longer member of the -ās ~ -āsas opposition emerged in Proto-Indo-European out of its shorter counterpart by means of a univerbation with a pronominal clitic.