In 1984, when the project entitled "New Edition of the Astadhyayi (A.) was undertaken in the Centre of Advanced Study in Sanskrit, I had an opportunity to study the text of the A. with Prof. S. D. Joshi, the then Director of the CASS. Although we primarily studied the text with a historical approach, many other facets of the Papinian grammar were revealed to us. After the discovery of the Fundamentals of Anuvetti and The Role of the Particle ca, we found ourselves entangled in a variegated labyrinth of the raddhitas. The present work is a result of our attempt at fathoming the depths of the taddhita section.
One of the outstanding features of Indian traditional grammar ack- nowledged by linguists all over the world is the detailed study of the internal structure of words. Patanjali aptly describes Panini's grammar as sabdanu Sasanam. The largest section in the A. is devoted to the taddhitasabdanu sasana. The vocabulary generated by the taddhita rules includes words of routine usage. They refer to names of people, their professions, habits, games, likes and dislikes, places inhabited by them, their social, cultural and political activities and even their emotional underworld. However, the study of the taddhita rules is interesting not only because they have a bearing on the aspects of social behaviour of those days in which Panini lived, but also because their formal structure and composition evince a few facets of Panini's genius. The systematic arrangement of the three types of rules, namely, the pratyayadhikaras, the arthadhikaras and the special rules dealing with individual formations shows a hierarchical structure firmly built throughout the taddhita section. The three-fold specification, namely, morphological, syntactic and semantic, obtaining in the taddhita rules is a unique feature of this section. A closer look at the statement of meaning in the rules leads us to conclude that Panini has, in the taddhita section, assumed a lexical rather than a generative hypothesis. In other words, the taddhita formations do not directly emerge from the source sentences. The arthadhikaras merely establish correspondence of meaning between a source sentence and a taddhita derivative, for instance, between kaşayena raktam and kaşayam. Selectional restriction and specification of referent by refer ring to the semantic class or grammatical structure of the stem are some of the interesting features of the arthadikaras. The study of the types of syntactic structures underlying the arthadikaras and of the arrangement of vocabulary in the taddhita rules enables us to catch a glimpse of Papinian insights. The present work is thus yet another step towards understanding Panini. I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to my colleagues and students who helped me in a number of ways while improving the text of the present monograph. I am specially thankful to Dr. Suniti Dubley, Dr. Bhagyalata Pataskar, Dr. Shailaja Katre and Miss Yashodhara Kar for their assistance. My sincere thanks are due to the Manager of the Poona University Press and his staff for a careful and neat printing of the book.
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