Amreditas and Related Constellations in the Rigveda‪.‬

In discussions of compound types in the Vedic language, the category that is typically placed at or near the end and given only cursory treatment is the amredita. (1) It is easy to see why this is so. Formally, an amredita consists of two adjacent identical complete words. The only feature distinguishing the amredita qua compound is that only the first of the repeated words is provided with an accent. (2) In the padapatha text the two members are regularly separated by an avagraha, as is normally the case with compounds, but the samhita text transmits the members together just as it would any two adjacent words, applying whatever sandhi rules may be relevant. In this study we will follow the procedure of Aufrecht (1877) and cite amreditas with a hyphen between their members, except where vowel sandhi is operative between the two constituents. Thus, agnim-agnim, dhiyam-dhiyam, iheha, etc. Semantically, amreditas were recognized already by Panini as signalling durative and distributive values, i.e., the notions of undelimited continuation ('over and over, again and again') and singulatim repetition ('one by one, one after the other'), which, when applied to all members of a set, may attain universality ('every'). (3) But, as we shall see, the semantics of this category as a whole shows nuanced variation depending on the part of speech class of the individual amreditas.