4.3. Sentence-Meaning in Other Systems of Knowledge

In the School of Grammar, ancient preceptors like Pāṇini, Kātyāyana and Patañjali have not explicitly discussed on the nature of sentence meaning. Still, some remarkable observations can be found in their works.

Pāṇini comprised all his ideas on the concept of sentence in the aphorism:

"samarthaḥ padavidihiḥ"
  —(Yogasūtras 2.1.1).

While commenting upon the aphorism:

"prātipadikārthaliṅgaparimāṇavacanamātre prathamā"
  —(Pāṇini, 2.3.46),

Patañjali observes that adjectival-substantive relation is something different from the word meanings and it is the sentence meaning (Mahābhāṣya, under Pāṇini, 2.3.46). Kaiyaṭa states that sentence is mukhyaśabda (prime word), and the sentence-meaning is the mukhyaśabdārtha (prime meaning). This view of sentence-meaning is in the nature of the relation among the wordmeanings (Under Pāṇini, 1.2.45). While commenting upon this statement, Nageśa points out that there is a relation between a sentence and its meaning, known as śakti (Udyota, under Pāṇini, 1.2.45).

An ancient grammarian Vyāḍi has also presented some unique views on the nature of sentence meaning. He holds that the meaning of a word is any particular of a class (dravya). According to him, the function of a word in a sentence is to distinguish the thing it signifies, from all the similar things. Thus, the meaning of a sentence cannot be taken as the mutual connection of the word-meanings, but the mutual exclusion of those meanings. The early stages of the apoha doctrine maintained by the Buddhists can be traced in these views of Vyāḍi (Raja, 1963, p.193).

The Buddhist tradition has remarkable contributions in the semantic analysis of words and sentences. The idea of the Buddhist logicians about the essence of meaning is known as apohavāda (the theory of apoha). They maintain that the essence of meaning is characterised by negation and that words have no direct reference to objective realities. Diṅnāga, the famous Buddhist logician states that words deal directly with vikalpas, which are the conceptual images constructed in the mind. Therefore the relation between the words and the external object is not real.

The conceptual image, denoted by a word is characterised by the negation of all its counter-correlates or anyāpoha.

"vikalpayonayaḥ śabdāḥ vikalpāḥ śabdayonayaḥ",
  —(Diṅnāga, quoted by Raja, 1963, p.78fn).

This is the core of the theory of apoha, developed by the Buddhists.

This concept of negative approach to the meaning is also admitted in the case of compounds and sentences, by the Buddhists. In the compound word 'blue lotus', the term blue excludes all lotuses that are not blue, and the term lotus excludes all the blue things that are not lotuses. Thus the expression signifies the exclusion of non blue and non lotus. A sentence meaning is also imported in the same way. Though the meanings of the individual words are treated as negative, the import of a sentence is taken as positive in nature. This theory of negative approach towards meaning, has been criticised by the Mīmāṃsākas and Naiyāyikas. But in recent times, similar concepts about meaning have been developed by modern linguists like Ferdinand De Saussure (Raja, 1963, p.85).