Pāli is an Indo-Aryan language that was devised specially to transcribe in the third century BCE the oral preaching of Gautama Buddha (who lived in the sixth-fifth centuries BCE) in Lumbini, Shakya Republic (present-day Nepal). Pāli is not so much an artificial language as a language adapted to the particular discourse it tries to transcribe and derived from probably several closely related other Indo-Aryan languages with Sanskrit being kept in the background all the time. Pāli has the originality not to be attached to a writing system so that it can be written with any of the writing systems in use in the Indian subcontinent and in Southeast Asia, including, in more recent times, the Latin writing system extended for some diacritic elements. We have to understand Buddhism is a particular development of old Sanskrit classic Vedas with the declared ambition to differentiate itself from the various trends and branches of Vedic and ascetic preaching that produced Hinduism. The main difference is the refusal of any godlike creator of the universe. Will study here the fundamental role of the four participles, the absolutive and the infinitive in the building of this predicatory discourse. The four participles are adjectival or nominal non-finite verbal forms predicatively expanding either noun phrases or verbal phrases with four possible forms and values: The past participle of an action seen as fully completed is an adjectival expansion of a noun phrase. The active past participle is an adjectival expansion of a noun phrase seen as the agent of an action that has been fully completed. The present participle is an adjectival expansion of a noun phrase with an action that is seen in progress, hence partly completed and partly virtual.The future passive participle is an adjectival form expanding a noun phrase with an action that should, must, or could be done with the contradiction between the injunctive or optative modalization and the passive completion attached to a noun phrase which is the virtual actant who should, must or could carry this completed passive value. The absolutive (at times called gerund) is a non-finite form that expresses an action or state that, at the time of utterance, has been completed, has been credited to the main actant of the main clause of the utterance or the general situation conveyed by the utterance, and whose completion and merit-crediting to the main actant make the action of the main clause of the utterance possible, and without which this very action is not possible. The infinitive is a simple non-finite verbal expansion of the main clause of the utterance attached to one particular actant of this main clause or to its verb to which it is subservient. It expresses the action in its fullness, though with various values in the sentences as for virtual completion, partial completion, or total completion.What kind of mapping of the inner time of these non-finite forms can we see and how can the passive/active and injunctive/optative dimensions be integrated? Are we in langue, or are we in discourse? Is such predicatory discourse dealing with time, both universe and inner times, the same way as any reporting discourse?
Jacques Coulardeau (Mon,) studied this question.