Proceedings of the Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference

This paper explores the prosody of the Rigvedic clause against the backdrop of two phenomena: (1) the treatment of vowel-vowel junctures at the word boundary (in particular whether such sequences show hiatus or contraction) and (2) the caesura in trimeter (11- and 12-syllable) lines. The behavior, with respect to these phenomena, of a variety of functional elements in the language of the Rigveda is investigated, leading to the conclusion that (1) and (2) provide critical evidence for the natural language prosody of that language. A sharp contrast is drawn with approaches that assume that the relevant processes reflect “poetic license” or arise metri causa.