Epic Sanskrit

This chapter provides a detailed account of the transitive noun and adjective categories attested in Epic Sanskrit. The major Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, provide a large body of data in a form of Sanskrit slightly later than Vedic Prose, and close to the ‘Classical’ Sanskrit language. There is considerably more evidence for transitive nouns and adjectives in the epics than in Vedic Prose, but compared with the Rigveda transitive nouns and adjectives are still less common, and show less morphological variety. Again, statistical analysis shows that there is a clear correlation between transitivity and predication. As in the two previous chapters, a number of characteristic stem forms are thoroughly examined and exemplified. Statistics for subject-oriented data precede a section on participles and a detailed review of situation-oriented nouns.