Funded by a three- year Research Project Grant from the Leverhulme Trust (2019-2021), Uncovering Sanskrit Syntax is the first large-scale project to analyse interclausal syntax in Sanskrit. Focussing on three major phenomena – anaphora, control and unbounded dependencies – Uncovering Sanskrit Syntax will go beyond the standard two-way distinction between Vedic and Classical Sanskrit: by studying a wide variety of texts from different regions, genres and periods, it will document previously unresearched syntactic distinctions between different types of Sanskrit.

Our findings will be presented at international conferences and published in major linguistics and Indological journals. We will produce descriptive and formal analyses of syntactic phenomena in Sanskrit, and situate our findings in the wider typological context. The project will have a significant impact not only on our understanding of Sanskrit syntax, but also on theoretical syntax, diachronic syntactic change, sociolinguistic variation in the use of different Sanskrit varieties, and the possibility of reconstructing syntactic patterns for the parent language Proto-Indo-European.

This is a temporary website for our project. Please don't link to this page, as we hope to have a more extensive website on a different URL soon.

People

John Lowe		Adriana Molina-Muñoz		Antonia Ruppel
John Lowe is PI on the project. He is Departmental Lecturer in Syntax and Departmental Lecturer in Indo-Iranian Philology. He has published widely on Sanskrit language and linguistics, and theoretical syntax and semantics.		Adriana did her PhD in Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on how syntactic phenomena are affected by other components of the language faculty, such as morphology and semantics/pragmatics. She has investigated synchronically and diachronically different interface phenomena such as word order, compounding, relativization, ergativity, and aspect; focusing largely on Sanskrit and Hindi, but she has also worked on Bribri (Chibchan family, Costa Rica).		Antonia Ruppel did her PhD in Classics at the University of Cambridge and was subsequently the Townsend Senior Lecturer in the Greek, Latin and Sanskrit Languages at Cornell University. Her research interests include comparative philology, syntax, compounding, the history of linguistics, and language pedagogy. She is the author of Absolute Constructions in Early Indo-European (2012) and The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (2017).