Page 144 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
In the Dhatupatha, each verbal root is indicated by a metalinguistic marker and followed by its meaning, expressed by a noun in the locative case, that is, in the form 'root X in the meaning of Y.' The roots with their markers are treated like nouns: for example, a root with suffix -/'is declined like a noun ending in -/, and sandhi rules apply to its combination with the following word. Some of the meanings are given in terms of nouns derived from the same verbal root so that the information is circular and uninformative. When there are several meanings, these are dis- tinguished and different metalinguistic elements are used to distinguish the roots from each other. The following are examples from the fourth and seventh classes:
which subsequently, because of a sandhi rule, turns into:
aksair dlvyati 'he plays with dice.'
But the semantic interpretation of this sentence also contains the information that dice stand to the action of playing in the object relation which is expressed by the object (karman) karaka, realized on the surface level by the suffix -Onyielding:
aksan dlvyati 'he plays dice'
Panini distinguishes seven karaka relations char- acterized in semantic terms as follows:
(a) apadana'thefixedpointfromwhichsomething recedes'(1.4.24);
(b) sampradana 'indirect object' (1.4.32);
(c) karana 'the most effective means' (1.4.42);
(d) adhikarana 'locus' (1.4.45);
(e) karman'whatisprimarydesiredbythesubject'
(1.4.49);
(f) kartr 'what is independent' (1.4.54); (g) hetu 'what prompts the kartr' (1.4.55).
This system accounts for the meaning of sentences and complexmeaningrelationshipsbetweensentences by using mechanisms such as illustrated in the dice- playing example, that is, by systems of rules that oper- ate between the different levels and that are carefully ordered and related to each other. The resulting deri- vations account for equivalencies like those between the Active and the Passive. Other illustrations are discussed in Kiparsky and Staal (1969) including the causative relations that make use of the hetu karaka, which accounts for meaning relationships between sentences such as The elephant-driver mounts theele- phant and The elephant allows itself to be mounted by the elephant-driver, or The pupil learns grammar from the teacher and The teacher teaches grammar to the
pupil. Such meaning relationships, then, are treated by the grammar and not relegated to a dictionary.
The karaka system also accounts for the the mean- ings of nominal compounds and various other nom- inal forms that are related to simple sentences, for example, maker of pots, pot-maker = potter, in addition to: he makes pots, pots are made by him, etc.
In the realm of theoretical semantics, Panini made an important discovery(Brough 1951): the distinction between 'use' and 'mention.' In ordinary Sanskrit, a 'mentioned' or 'quoted' expression is indicated by the particle iti which follows it, that is, English a cor- responds to Sanskrit a-iti.Since grammar deals in the majority of cases with the form of expressions and not with their meaning or use, the grammar would be riddled with such iti's. Grammarians have accordingly restricted ordinary usage, and expressions without iti refer to their form.
The underlying distinction between language and metalanguage is explicit in Panini, the latter being referred to as upadesa (literally, 'teaching'). Met-
iv, 68 vii, 7
yuja samQdhau 'the root yuj- in the meaning of concentration'
yujir yoge 'the root yuj- in the meaning of conjunction.'
Like Panini's grammar itself, the Dhatupatha is part of the Indian scholarly tradition and its traditional curriculum that characterizes the Indian paideia of a classical education. Throughout the centuries, San- skrit authors have referred to it whenever meanings are discussed. For example, the main commentary on the YogasHtra, the Yogastitrabhasya attributed to Veda Vyasa of the seventh or eighth century AD, says in commenting on the first sutra:
Doubt as to the actual thing (yoga) is occasioned by doubt as to the meaning of the word. This doubt is removed by stating that in the language of the sQtra,yoga is etymologically derived from the root yuja in the sense of concentration and not from the root yuji in the sense of conjunction. [This comment shows, incidentally, that most contemporary interpretations of yoga in terms of 'union' are mistaken.]
2.2 Sentence Meaning
Sentence meanings are derived with the help of the karaka theory. KSraka relations, like 'deep structures,' occupy a level between semantic interpretations and surface structures. This level of linguistic analysiswas intentionally added; it does not depend on historical accident and has little to do with 'mismatch' or 'tension,' terms used by Deshpande (1991) in an other- wise interesting hypothesis about its ritual back- grounds. There is need for such a level because there is no one-to-one correspondence between the levels, as illustrated by the following example (see Kiparsky and Staal 1969:85). The sentence aksair dlvyati (he plays (with) dice) has as part of its semantic interpret- ation the information that the dice stand to the action of playing in the instrument relation which is ex- pressed by the instrument (karana) karaka, realized on the surface level by the suffix -bhis which becomes -aw yielding:
*aksais dlvyati
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