Syntactic evidence for metrical structure in Rigvedic stanzas

Abstract We introduce a dataset that contains basic grammatical and syntactic information on each word of the Rigveda. Based on the syntactic information in this dataset, we provide basic descriptive statistics and illustrate its usefulness by exploring to what extent distich boundaries are represented in syntactic dependencies. The results suggest that in Rigvedic stanzas, syntactic boundaries are constrained by distich structure in a systematic way.