Periphrasis in the Sanskrit Verb System*

Ancient Sanskrit had two tenses of particular interest: periphrastic perfect and periphrastic future. At first glance, they are rather similar: both realize a particular value of tense through a combination of a lexical verb (devoid of personal agreement) and an agreeing auxiliary. There are, however, important differences which are revealed in this chapter: the periphrastic future is available for every verb, and can be distinguished from the synthetic future on semantic grounds, while the periphrastic perfect is available only for certain verbs, and these do not make up a semantically homogeneous group. A formal analysis is proposed, within Paradigm Function Morphology, for the two periphrastic tenses. It is demonstrated that a morphological rather than a purely syntactic account is preferable here. The verbs with a periphrastic perfect make up a conjugation class; on the other hand, the periphrastic future is formalized as a morphosyntactic property whose default realization is periphrastic.