Skt. śudhyati/śudhyate ‘purify’ and the active/middle opposition in post-Vedic Sanskrit: A new function of a degrammaticalized category?

Kulikov, Leonid
(2021) Perspectives on language and linguistics: Essays in honour of Lucio Melazzo — ISBN: [978-88-5509-355-2], p. 261-276, published

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The Sanskrit -ya-presents normally inflected in the active in Vedic (activa (quasi-)tantum) start to be employed with middle inflection in the later language, as in the case of śudhyati/‑te ‘becomes pure’ or muhyati/-te ‘becomes confused’. For some roots such as śudh, middle forms become as frequent as their active counterparts in the Dharmaśāstras (Smr̥tis) and Epics. It will be demonstrated that, contrary to the widely spread opinion, such middle forms never show passive meaning and occur in the same usage as the corresponding active forms. Accordingly, such verbal forms should be translated as ‘becomes pure’, rather than *‘is purified’; ‘becomes confused’, rather than *‘is confused’. I will argue that the choice of the diathesis (active/middle) is determined by metrical reasons in many cases and depends on the position of the verbal form in the pāda. These developments in the post-Vedic verbal system may be partly due to the fact that the active/middle opposition was lost in contemporaneous Middle Indic vernaculars, where only active endings survive.
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Kulikov, L. (2021). Skt. śudhyati/śudhyate ‘purify’ and the active/middle opposition in post-Vedic Sanskrit: A new function of a degrammaticalized category? In M. Lucia Aliffi; Annamaria Bartolotta; Castrenze Nigrelli (eds) (ed.), Perspectives on language and linguistics: Essays in honour of Lucio Melazzo (p. p. 261-276). Palermo University Press. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/224456