Philosophical reflections on the Vedic injunctive as an incorporeal intelligible that comes into existence by proximity
The injunctive in Vedic is a hollow verbal form: morphologically tenseless and moodless. It carries no morphological marking of either tense or mood. In this sense, it is not per se: it is a form that is structurally non‑existent—a grammatical shell without inherent specification. This is reflected in its shape, which is entirely unmarked, as one can see in the box below (1). /kr ˚ As we can see from the window above, the injunctive appears as a non‑verbal form, in line with recent studies - Kiparsky (2), Hollenbaugh - which converge on the following point: Formally : it is a finite verb with secondary endings and no augment, and crucially, no tense or mood‑features. Functionally : it is underspecified; its temporal or modal value is supplied by context and pragmatic inference, not by morphology. Therefore, when I say that the injunctive is an intelligible incorporeal that comes into existence by proximity, I mean precisely this: it is structurally “empty” and ...