What Counts as a Participle? Lowe's Formal Analysis Rewrites Rigvedic Grammar

What Counts as a Participle? Lowe's Formal Analysis Rewrites Rigvedic Grammar

In Vedic Sanskrit studies, a seemingly simple question masks genuine difficulty: what counts as a participle? The answer matters. It shapes how we read the Rigveda—one of humanity's oldest texts—and what we can say it means.

Linguist John J. Lowe, now Associate Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, spent years cataloging and analyzing thousands of these forms. His 2015 book Participles in Rigvedic Sanskrit: The Syntax and Semantics of Adjectival Verb Forms (Oxford University Press) does something philologists rarely pull off cleanly: it rewrites a grammatical category from the ground up, using formal linguistic method to challenge assumptions made for generations.

The problem is old. The Rigveda is a poetic text in which deliberate obscurity is the governing aesthetic and in which the rules of language are pushed to their limits in order to produce the ideal poetic expression, and many Vedic sentences are of controversial, disputed meaning. Traditional Sanskrit grammar—the Aṣṭādhyāyī (astādhyāyī, "eight chapters") of Pāṇini, composed around the 5th century BCE—already categorized participles. Indian grammarians had names for them: kṛdanta (krīdanta, a verbal adjective). Later European Sanskritists inherited these categories and refined them, but rarely questioned the boundaries.

Lowe examines several thousand examples of tense-aspect stem participles in the Rigveda and the passages in which they appear, in terms of both their syntax and semantics. This is not armchair theorizing. He builds a formal model using Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG)—a framework that specifies how words combine, how they govern objects, how they signal meaning through structure. Crucially, he defines certain stems and stem-types as outside the synchronic category of participle on the basis of their syntactic and semantic properties.

That last phrase does real work. Synchronic means "at a single moment in time"—here, Rigvedic Sanskrit as used in the hymns, not what it might have become later. On the basis of means he doesn't guess. He measures: Does the form govern an accusative object (a verbal trait)? Can it stand alone as an adjective? Does it modify a noun or a whole clause? Does it carry tense information? The answer to each question either includes a form in the participle category or excludes it.

Some examples help show why this matters. A present participle in Rigvedic Sanskrit can appear in adnominal position—modifying a noun, like "the breaking wave." But it can also function as a verb phrase, governing objects, like "breaking the wave." Lowe demonstrates that participial subcategorization parallels verbal subcategorization, providing evidence that participles are synchronically inflectional verb forms. In plain language: they behave like verbs because they are verbs, grammatically speaking, not adjectives wearing verb-like clothes.

Other stems look like participles in form—they have the right endings—but their behavior doesn't match. Some negated participles (those prefixed with á(n)-, meaning "not") fail to govern accusative objects even when formed from transitive roots. Of those participles whose argument structure differs from that of the corresponding finite forms, some may have originated as adjectives or may have become adjectivized, and the combining of a participle with the negative prefix was originally a process of adjectival derivation. These are true participial fossils—forms that used to function as verbs but lexicalized (froze) into adjectives. Lowe's method catches this drift.

The broader point cuts deeper. Vedic scholarship rests on interpretation. How you parse a sentence—whether a word is a participle or not—shapes meaning. If a form modifies a noun, the reader gets one image. If it's verbal and governs a clause, the image shifts. Lowe's formal approach forces precision. Either a form exhibits the structural properties of a participle in Rigvedic Sanskrit, or it doesn't. No appeals to "tradition says so" or "similar languages do this."

This upends some inherited distinctions. Traditional grammars had sorted participles into subtypes with neat names. Lowe's analysis redistributes the data. Some stems move out of the participle bin entirely. Others, previously marginal or treated as exceptions, become central examples. The category shrinks and clarifies.

Does this mean the old grammarians were "wrong"? Not exactly. They worked from different questions and evidence. But their categories didn't rest on formal analysis. Pāṇini and his successors were brilliant taxonomists, yet they lacked modern linguistics' tools for measuring syntax and semantics rigorously. When Lowe applies those tools, the picture changes.

The book also includes an appendix on Participles in the Indian Grammatical Tradition—Lowe's way of showing he respects the prior tradition while superseding it. He's not dismissing Pāṇini; he's outflanking him with method.

The payoff? Readers of the Rigveda can now check: is a scholar calling something a participle really justified by structure, or by habit? It's a small gate into a large landscape of Vedic interpretation. When you redefine what counts as a verbal form, you reopen questions about tense, mood, causation—everything a verb encodes. The primary distinction is between the functions of participles as modifiers of nouns and of verbs/clauses respectively. Clarity on that distinction ripples outward.

Philology often works in dust and silence. Lowe's book is a reminder that rigorous method—asking hard questions about form and function, refusing easy categories—can overturn assumptions buried deep in scholarship. The Rigveda has been read for 3,000 years. It will be read for 3,000 more. How we parse its participles matters more than it seems.