5. The Concept of Sentence

As discussed, language is perceived as the method of communicating one's thoughts. An idea or a thought can never be in bits and pieces, but is a unitary whole. Thus, it is communicated also as a unitary whole, but not in terms of its parts. Since words cannot communicate the speaker's thought fully, sentence is to be considered as the unit of language, which can communicate the whole idea. Different thinkers accept either a letter or a word or a sentence as the unit of language. But all of them emphasise the role of sentence in communicating the ideas conceived by the speaker. Therefore the study of sentence and sentence-meaning became the most important concept for linguists, grammarians and philosophers. Though we cannot find any explicit discussions on this topic in the ancient literature, some glimpses can be seen in Vedic texts. As stated, a simple definition of sentence is cited in Bṛhaddevatā. Later, Naiyāyikas and Mīmāṃsakas have expounded the syntactico-semantic analysis of sentence. They have produced several independent treatises on the systematic analysis of sentence. In Sanskrit grammar, the emphasis has been given to prakriyā or the formative aspect of words, while the treatises on the syntacticosemantic analysis of sentence are a few and far between. Vākyapadīya of Bhartṛhari, Bhūṣaṇasāra of Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa, Laghumañjūṣā of Nāgeśa etc. have completely devoted their attention into this topic. Among them, Vākyapadīya possesses a prime position in the realm of the philosophy of language.