Vakyapadiya (study of the concept of Sentence)
by Sarath P. Nath | 2018 | 36,088 words
This page relates ‘Syntactic and Semantic thoughts in India’ of the study on Vakyapadiya by Bhartrhari and his treatment of the Concept of Sentence in Language. Bhartrhari was a great grammarian and philosopher who explored the depth and breadth of Sanskrit grammar. These pages analyse the concepts and discussions on sentence and sentence-meaning presented in the Vakyapadiya, against the different systems of knowledge prevalent in ancient India (such as Mimamsa, Nyaya and Vyakarana).
4. Syntactic and Semantic thoughts in India
One of the fundamental aspects of the philosophy of language, that has attracted the serious attention of all thinkers, is the relation between śabda (the linguistic element) and its meaning (artha). The term śabda is normally used to refer to a linguistic element, which is the meaningful unit of speech. Philosophers held different views on the linguistic element that is referred to by the term śabda. According to various systems, it is the articulated sound or the phoneme (varṇa) or the word (pada) or the sentence (vākya). Mīmāṃsakas consider the letters or phonemes as śabda, which are eternal. Words and sentences are only the manifestations of these phonemes. For the Naiyāyikas, the term śabda refers to the word which is produced by the speaker and heard by the listener. Therefore, śabda is impermanent for them. According to the Sphoṭa theory of grammarians, śabda is eternal, but not in the form of letters. To Bhartṛhari, śabda is the complete utterance of the sentence and is the unit of language called vākyasphoṭa (Coward and Raja, 2008, p.5). Grammarians analyse the sentence also into morphemes for grammatical purpose, which are termed as padasphoṭa and varṇasphoṭa.