Grammaticalization of participles and gerunds in Indo-Aryan: Preterite, future, infinitive

he development of the Sanskrit passive past participle and gerund or passive verbal adjective of obligation in Indo-Aryan are up to a certain point parallel and resulted respectively in an ergative alignment in past sentences in Western languages and a nominative realignment in both future and past in Eastern languages. Only Eastern languages grammaticalized the old endings into the specific temporal markers -l- for past and -b- for future, while throughout the IA area the obligative passive verbal adjective also evolved into an infinitive. The aim of the paper is to account for the various grammaticalization paths of these forms in a unified manner, taking into account the whole range of other competing constructions in the various IA languages considered, as well as comparable instances of grammaticalization in Latin and Romance languages.