The present paper is focused on the way Vayākaraṇas and Ālaṃkārikas analysed a specific kind of karmadhāraya compounds, taught in Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.1.56 and 72 and later associated with the upamā- and the rūpaka-figures respectively. On the basis of a fresh interpretation of the relevant grammatical sources, the authors try both to understand how the theorists involved them in their analysis and to reconstruct the several steps of the inquiries realized by the modern scholarship on this topic. Nonetheless their research is (...) targeted on the interpretation of these two Pāṇini rules and they conclude that these rules do not actually target similes and metaphorical identifications, but, on the one hand, A 2.1.55-56 deal with a functional pair of figurative compounds involving an upamāna and an upamita, i.e. a reference standard and something which is benchmarked, and, on the other, A 2.1.72 closes a series of karmadhāraya-rules, aimed at illustrating A 2.1.57. Furthermore, they exclude that Pāṇini in A 2.1.55-56 used the term sāmānya as a tertium comparationis, even though Patañjali had already advanced—but eventually rejected—this interpretation. (shrink)

The topic of asymmetry between the semantic and the phono-morphological levels of language emerges very early in Indian technical and speculative reflections as it also does in pre-socratic Greek thought. A well established relation between words and the objects they denote seems to have been presupposed for each analysis of the signification long before its earliest statement. The present paper aims at shedding light on two different patterns of tackling the mentioned problem. The first approach sees asymmetry as an exception (...) to the regular correspondence between language and reality, whereas the second approach considers language in itself as a conceptualisation which does not faithfully represent reality. In the latter case, asymmetry is no longer an exception, but the rule. (shrink)

The present joint contribution offers a tentative comprehensive re-interpretation of Pāṇini’s rule A 2.3.46, and shows how that rule teaches the application of the nominative ending without making use of the notion of “subject,” a notion that belongs to other grammatical systems, but not to Pāṇini’s. We discuss the controversial domain of some segments of its wording by attempting to adhere to Pāṇini’s framework and his usus scribendi. In particular, we read the first constituent of the compound prātipadikārtha­ liṅgaparimāṇavacana­ as (...) a genitive depending on a dvandva made up of three constituents, i.e., artha­, liṅga­, and parimāṇavacana­, and we take parimāṇa­ as denoting a quantity that, combining with vacana­, is substantially equivalent to the concept of grammatical number in modern linguistics. We finally show that our reading of A 2.3.46 is able to generate the nominative endings affixed to the subject and predicate of a nominal sentence: as a consequence, nominal sentences might actually not have been neglected by Pāṇini. (shrink)

Norman in 1969 emphasised a linguistic difference between the Vedic compound yogakṣema- interpreted as a dvandva and the widely distributed Early Buddhist compound yogakkhema-, analysed as a tatpuruṣa “rest from exertion”. On the basis of our analysis of the relevant Pali sources and of the more ancient Vedic occurrences—some of which are quite far from the earliest denotation of the two cyclic phases of the assumed semi-nomadic Indo-Āryan life—we have undertaken a classification of the several meanings of this compound, in (...) order to distinguish their different facets and to enable us to easily bring about the comparison proposed by Norman in 1969 and in 1993 [1991]. Unlike Norman, we eventually postulated a common reading of this compound as a tatpuruṣa originally denoting an almost material target of welfare, from which both the Brāhmaṇic and the Buddhist usages, whose meaning is predominantly immaterial, might have developed. (shrink)