Verbal Morphology and Polyfunctionality in Old Tamil:Evidence from Hero-stone Inscriptions (ca. 500-650 CE)

Rien International audience The historical development of Tamil verbal morphology is outstandingly complex as it reflects several stages of development spanning several centuries (ca. 300 BCE-600 CE). Previous work on early Tamil, within the framework of historical linguistics, has made it clear that in the initial stage: 1) the bare stems without many morphological elements were used in different syntactic functions; 2) there was no categorial distinction between noun and verb; 3) the same inflexional material was used to encode various morphosyntactic functions; 4) the Tamil Finite Verb structure with fully developed pronominal suffixes is a later development; etc. (Bloch 1946, Caldwell 1856, Meenakshisundaran 1965, Rajam 1992, Renganathan 2013, Vinson 1878). The ceyyum pattern as finite verb (see Tolkāppiyam, Naṉṉūḷ, etc. and the commentators on these texts) is one such earlier form that stands as evidence for the complex relation between morphology and syntax. In this paper, I try to examine the verbal morphology from hero-stone inscriptions dating from 500-650 CE. In this corpus, 27 stems occur in different morphological configurations, fulfilling different syntactic or grammatical functions. These forms consist of bare stems, personal (finite) forms and non-finite forms, which function as predicates, determinants, adverbial participles, participial nouns, etc. I try to analyse this type of flexible categorial features in terms of morphological and lexical polyfunctionality (Pilot-Raichoor 2012). The data from hero-stone inscriptions contain several layers of morphological lexical developments that stretch from the earliest till the modern periods and add more information on the historical development of Tamil and Dravidian verb morphology.