Brill's Studies in Historical Linguistics

Reflexivity in Vedic offers a corpus-based synchronic and diachronic analysis of reflexivity in the language of the Rgveda and Atharvaveda, two of the most ancient corpora ever composed in an Indo-European language. Applying a functional and cognitivist framework, Veronica Orqueda discusses the different possible strategies and proposes a distribution determined by the interaction between reflexivity, transitivity and valency. This study enriches typological approaches to the emergence of reflexives and therefore, on the basis of the Vedic data, it shows that nominal reflexive strategies may especially arise in contexts of underspecified verbal valency.