Action nouns in Vedic support-verb constructions with kṛ

Abstract

Action nouns can be formed from verbal roots in Vedic Old Indo-Aryan following various derivational patterns. The question is whether, and to what extent, such nouns, if derived from the same underlying root, can be considered equivalent or synonymous. It has been argued by several scholars that deverbal *-ti-stem and *-tu-stem action nouns were functionally-semantically different in Proto-Indo-European and ancient Indo-European languages such as Greek, Latin and the Indo-Iranian languages basically preserved this distinction. In this context, Benveniste pointed out that support-verb constructions in Ancient Greek, as a rule, involved -σι-stems (< *-ti-) as nominal hosts and not -τυ-stems (< *-tu-). The present paper shows that the same distribution of the two types of action nouns can be observed in the support-verb constructions of Early Vedic as well, a fact that nicely corroborates the assumption of their fundamental functional-semantic difference. It may be expected that further research will be able to reveal similar distinctions between other types of action nouns on the basis of analogous distributional patterns.