Welcome!

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. Focusing 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.