Part 2 - The causes of verbal knowledge in Mīmāṃsā

The most important contribution of ancient India to general linguistics is the concept of śābdabodha (verbal comprehension) and its causes. It is the Mīmāṃsā school of thought that brought forward the concept of the causes of verbal knowledge with the views to explaining from the analytical and associationist standpoint, how syntactic unity is effected among the various isolated words which comprise the sentence.

A sentence is used to convey some meaning to the hearer. This is done through the use of words. The hearer understands the meaning of words used in a sentence and forms a verbal knowledge which is technically called śābdabodha. Śābdabodha is a total knowledge arising from words. If śābdabodha is to arise words and their meanings must be interrelated in certain ways, and this would bring the process of śābdabodha to a completion. But this also means that there are a number of causal conditions (kāraṇas) without which the process of sentential comprehension would not be completed. If the word is taken as an autonomous unit of sound and sense, it is necessary to point out the cementing factors which unite the different words, with their individual meanings, when they form a single sentence. There are such three factors or conditions for the understanding of the correlation of the words in a sentence.

These three factors are namely:

(1) ākāṅkṣā i.e. mutual expectancy of the words that convey the agent, object and action,
(2) yogyatā i.e. non-contradiction of the intended relation of word meanings, and
(3) sannidhi or āsatti i.e. proximity, that is to say, the presentation of the meaning of the words in the sentence without any interruption.

These conditions for the understanding of the sentence-meaning were first promulgated by the Mīmāṃsakas^[1] and later on taken up by all other systems of Indian philosophy with slight modifications. Later on, one more factor called tātparya (intention of the speaker or the purport of the sentence) was added to these three by some thinkers.^[2]

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

(a) atrākāṅkṣā ca yogyatvaṃ sannidhiśceti tattrayam /
vākyārthāvagame sarvaiḥ kāraṇatvena kalpyate // Mānameyodaya , p. 99
(b) ākāṅkṣā sannidhānaṃ ca yogyatā ceti ca trayam /
saṃbandhakāraṇatvena kḷptaṃ nānantaraśrutiḥ // Tantravārttika , Volume I, p. 455

[2]:

āsattiyogyatākāṅkṣā tātparyajñānemiṣyate kāraṇam / Bhāṣāpariccheda , Kārikā 82