Hedging in diachrony: the case of V edic S anskrit iva (2023)

Abstract: The rhetoric strategy of hedging serves to attenuate speech acts and their semantic content, as in English ‘kind of’ or ‘somehow’. While hedging has recently met with increasing interest in linguistic research, most studies deal with modern languages, preferably English, and take a synchronic approach. This paper complements this research by tracing the diachronic syntactic flexibilization of the Vedic Sanskrit particle iva from a marker of comparison (‘like’) to a full-fledged adaptor. We discuss the outcomes of a diachronic Bayesian framework applied to iva constructions in a Universal Dependencies treebank, and supplement these results with a qualitative discussion of relevant text passages.

## introduction hedging is a rhetorical strategy by which a speaker can attenuate either the full semantic membership of an expression, as in example (1a) (propositional hedging), or the force of a speech act, as in (1b) (speech act hedging; @xcite . until recently, 1 hedges were considered to be marginal items that contribute little to communication, but their crucial role both in spoken and in written speech is now generally acknowledged by various linguistic disciplines @xcite . from the point of view of grammaticalization and/or pragmaticalization studies, hedges are interesting because they have been proven to emerge from different sources both intra-and crosslinguistically @xcite . furthermore, although the distinction between propositional and 1 @xcite is the first study on hedges in english. despite the abundance of studies on hedging in modern languages, the phenomenon has still been little studied in ancient languages, one exception being an in-depth analysis of the use of the approximation marker hōs épos eipeîn 'so to say' in plato's gorgias @xcite . however, ancient languages that enjoy centuries of attestation and that have been handed down to us in sufficiently large corpora provide a privileged point of view for the study of hedging, because they allow us to trace the emergence of new hedges as well as the successive development of new functions. with centuries of attestation and an extant corpus of over three million tokens, vedic sanskrit (henceforth vedic) is one such language. in this paper, we investigate the development of the particle iva, which in vedic functions both as a comparison and an approximation marker. after summarizing the grammaticalization process that in the earliest texts lead to the development of the approximative function from the comparative one, we perform a quantitative analysis of the occurrences of iva in vedic texts, in order to assess whether the particle underwent further syntactic and pragmatic developments. given the pragmatic nature of the phenomenon, corpus-based approaches are most suited for the study of hedging, because they allow to investigate genuinely attested language data rather than just invented sample sentences. in the case of an ancient language like vedic, for which we can only make use of the available texts, a corpusbased approach to the study of iva's approximating function is still a desideratum, as the only existing study @xcite is based on a handful of passages. in our study we employ a corpus with manually validated syntactic annotations, the vedic treebank (vtb, see @xcite , which allows us to investigate the syntactic functions taken by the particle and to detect changes in the syntactic contexts in which it occurs. since the occurrences of approximating iva are sparse in the vtb, we extend our data set with silver annotations obtained by an unsupervised parse of all vedic texts contained in the digital corpus of sanskrit (dcs, @xcite . section 2 of this paper gives a summary of previous research on approximators, including an overview of the current understanding in vedic studies. sections 3 and 4 introduce the data set and describe the probabilistic model used to assess diachronic trends in the data, with a special focus on how to use data obtained in an unsupervised manner (sec. 4.2). a more detailed qualitative evaluation is presented in sec. 5. -data and scripts are available at https://github. com/oliverhellwig/sanskrit/tree/ master/papers/2023tlt . ## data our diachronic analysis of iva as an approximator is based on the dependency annotations collected in the vedic treebank @xcite , which is annotated using universal dependencies. 5 as is shown in the alternation between the main functions of iva becomes much clearer when we add a chronological component to the data. dating vedic texts is notoriously difficult because text-internal and external chronological clues are largely missing (see e.g. @xcite . the vtb therefore assigns each vedic text to one of five successive chronological layers, based on a general consensus in vedic studies (details in hellwig and sellmer, 2021): the oldest part of the rigveda (1-rv, ca. 15th-11th c. bce), the metrical texts of the mantra period (2-ma, 10th-8th c. bce), old (3-po ca. 8th-7th c. bce) and late prose (4-p, ca. 7th-6th c. bce), and the prose texts of the sūtra period (5-su, ca. 4th c. bce -3th c. ce). rows 2ff. of in this section, we focus on the data in column four of we implement all models in rstan (stan development team, 2022) and compare them using the between comparative and adaptor reading (see example 8): since the former reading is by far the most frequent in the rv and mantra language, annotators in these cases are likely to chose the label case or mark, and therefore approximative iva with a noun as head may be slightly under-represented in these two layers. 8 this implies that an ordinal variable is transformed into a scalar. such an approach is problematic (see e.g. mckelvey and zavoina 1975 for the case of ordinal predicted variables), and it would be more meaningful to model time either with an ordered factor or to estimate at least the widths of the time slots before performing the transformation. the data set studied here is, however, not large enough to obtain reliable estimates of the additional parameters. expected log pointwise predictive density (elpd) in a leave-one-out setting @xcite . each model is trained for 5,000 iterations and with four parallel chains. model diagnostics ( r, ess) show no problems in the sampling process. the results in the chance to capture the temporal dynamics in the three later slots of vedic and thus achieves a better fit. ## qualitative analysis the data presented in section 4 confirms the syntactic flexibilization of iva hypothesized in section 2: as the proportion of noun + iva constructions decreases, the particle starts occurring with other parts of speech; furthermore, the analysis in section 4 suggests that this development is to be attributed to both register and time. in this section, we provide a more detailed qualitative evaluation of the data showing that the extension of iva's scope to other parts of speech co-occurs with the development of new functions for this particle. the grammaticalization process described in section 2 first results in the employment of iva with nouns (see example 7a). other parts of speech occurring with iva in layers 3-po and 4-pl belong either to open classes, such as verbs (example 10) and adjectives (11), or to closed classes such as conjunctions (12) and particles (13). in ex-ample (10), king janaka asks the sage yājñavalkya about the possible substitutes for the agnihotra, a meal offering usually consisting of milk. the conversation comes to an end when yājñavalkya states that, even in the absence of water, the agnihotra can be celebrated by offering, 'in some way' (iva), 'truth in faith' (satyam śraddhāyām). similarly, in (11), the author explains that, during the soma sacrifice, the sacrificial post is anointed from its base upwards because it is for heaven that it is anointed and heaven is 'in some way' (iva) 'upwards' (parāṅ). in examples (12) and ( 13 ), where iva follows the conjunctions uta 'and' and the causal expression tasmāt vā 'therefore', the particle seems to have scope not only on the preceding lexical item, but on the whole proposition. in (12), ajātaśatru explains to gārgya that, when one is asleep, one gathers the cognitive power of the vital functions into the space within one's heart. the dream then consists of the perceptions that the sleeping person experiences in her heart, rather than in the external world. in this example, the sequence of uta iva marks the fictive nature of the events experienced in the dream. he may appear to become a great king or an eminent brahmin, or to visit the highest and the lowest regions.' (br . hadāran . yaka-upanis . ad 2.1.18.3; trans. @xcite example ( 13 ) is concerned with explaining the creation of the universe by pointing out similarities between words. at the beginning there was nothing but seven vital airs; they were turned into seven persons and these, in turn, into body parts of prajāpati, the 'lord of generation'. in this process, the best part (śrī-) of each person was concentrated and became prajāpati's head (śiras-; note the phonetic similarity of the words śrī and śiras). in the example, the sequence tasmāt vā iva etat śirah . seems to present the preceding clause ('it was thereto that the vital airs resorted'), which involves the verb śri-'rest on', as a further possible explanation of the word śiras 'head' to which, however, the author does not fully commit. the source for the syntactic flexibilization of iva may also be found in the very sort of texts contained in layers 3-po and 4-pl. in the brāhman . as, ancillary texts providing detailed explanations of rituals, iva is often employed in order to point out correspondences among elements of the ritual realm, of the cosmic realm, or of daily life. in such cases, the sequence noun + iva co-occurs with a causal particle or adverb such as hi 'for, because' or tasmāt therefore': see example ( 14 ), where the phrase vājinam iva 'some sort of steed' is followed by the particle hi (see also example 11): ## summary and conclusion originally a marker of phrasal comparison, the vedic particle iva grammaticalized into an approximation marker signaling the semantically loose use of the preceding noun (sect. 2.2). this grammaticalization process can already be traced in the oldest texts (layers 1-rv and 2-ma) by manual scrutiny @xcite , but is not captured by the syntactic annotation contained in the vtb; this is because, in ambiguous contexts that may have been responsible for the reanalysis of iva into an adaptor, the particle was usually annotated as a marker of comparison (deprels case or mark) by the annotators, as this is by far its most common function in the rv. in this paper we have focused on the further syntactic flexibilization of iva in later vedic texts. bayesian analysis (sect. 4) has shown that the proportion of noun + iva constructions, in which the particle has scope on the immediately preceding lexical item, decreases in layers 3-po, 4-pl and 5-su and that this break is to be attributed to both time and register. accordingly, iva starts occurring with parts of speech other than noun and, as shown by the qualitative analysis of sect. 5, gradually develops new functions. first, the frequent occurrence of iva with other particles or conjunctions leads to an extension of its scope to the whole proposition (see examples 11 to 14); second, in some such cases iva seems to mark the metaphorical meaning of the expression (example 14) or seems to function as a speech-act edge, signaling lack of commitment in the statement being uttered (example 13). ultimately, the quantitative and qualitative analyses of iva in vedic prose seems to mirror the diachrony of adaptors as attested cross-linguistically and thus provides further evidence for the development of the particle from a marker of comparison to an approximation marker, and not vice versa.