Hi John and group,

>
>This commonly putting the agent of ta-particples in genitive, is this
>discussed in Warder somewhere? I don't recall seeing it before. Are
>there other common examples from the canon that you can share with us?

I'm looking forward to an answer from Ole on this one as well, but based on what he has proposed elsewhere I'd like to jump ahead and guess that the most common examples would be with the enclitic pronouns me, no, te. Geiger says that these can be instr, dat, gen in the singular and acc, instr, dat, gen in the plural. But if you don't agree that the enclitics can be instrumentals, then you have many cases of genitives with ppp-s. Evam me suta.m would be a typical example. The Geigerians would say this = Evam mayaa suta.m. Others would call it an example of a genitive as agent of a ppp (-ta participle).

To me it's more of a question of definitions. As case systems collapse and a single form starts to stand for what previously were two cases (as with genitive and dative in Pali) do you say there is now only a single case with a wider range of application, or do you continue to distinguish the cases according to their case-syntactic functions, despite their coalescence in form? Since these collapses aren't uniform ('real' datives are still sometimes used, as in dative of purpose for example) the problems can get a bit complicated.

If we only find genitives for the agents of ppp-s in the enclitics, I would tend to explain it as the enclitics having widened their scope to include genitives. But if there are examples where inflected nouns in the genitive unambiguously are the agents of a ppp, then it becomes easier to argue that the enclitic forms also are genitives.

best regards,

/Rett