David M. Goldstein, Stephanie W. Jamison, and Brent Vine (eds.). 2016. Proceedings of the 27th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference. Bremen: Hempen. ###–###. R ̥ gvedic śáktīvant-: Accentuation and Statistical Modeling of 1 Allomorph Selection in Vedic -mant/vant-stems 2 RYAN SANDELL 3 University of California, Los Angeles 4 1. śáktīvant-: some formal peculiarities 5 The adjectival secondary derivative śáktīvant- ‘able, powerful’ has two tokens in 6 the R ̥ gveda: 1 it appears once as a vocative śáktīvaḥ in the midst of the Indra cycle 7 in Book V, at 5.31.6c, and a second time as a nominative plural śáktīvantaḥ in the 8 final Anhangslied of Book VI, at 6.75.9b. At first glance, the morphology of this 9 stem is completely transparent: it is a derivative in -vant-, of which the R ̥ gveda 10 alone attests more than 200 distinct types, 2 apparently built to the nominal stem 11 śaktí-/śákti- ‘ability, skill’, which is in turn a feminine abstract noun derived with 12 the primary suffix -ti- built to the root √śak ‘be able’. Although the segmental 13 components and compositional semantics of śáktīvant- entirely accord with this 14 derivational analysis, śáktīvant- is noteworthy in several respects: 15 1. Although its base śaktí-/śákti- is attested in the RV with both initial- 16 syllable and second-syllable accent, the instances of śáktīvant- only show 17 the high tone on the initial syllable. 18 2. The vowel immediately preceding -vant- is unexpectedly long, ī, where 19 the base śaktí-/śákti- only attests short i. 20 3. Secondary adjectival derivatives to primary ti-stems are usually built 21 with the suffix -mant-, (e.g., r ̥ ṣṭimánt- ‘having spears’). 22 śáktīvant- is not merely interesting for this constellation of formal peculiari- 23 ties, but also because it potentially furnishes valuable information about the 24 1 All Vedic forms cited in this paper are from the R ̥ gveda (abbreviated RV) unless explicitly identified otherwise. 2 I count 208 stems with -vant- as the outermost derivational suffix in the reverse index of Grassmann 1876 [1976]:1728–30, to be precise. A considerable number of these vant-stems are hapax legomena and this derivational suffix can therefore be assessed as highly productive, following the corpus-based measurements of morphological productivity described in Baayen 1989 and validated for the RV’ic corpus in Sandell 2015a:Chap. 5.