A critical analysis of sphota theory

Indo-Iranian Journal, 2019

The present article examines Somānanda's understanding of the denotative capacity of speech (śabda) as presented in his Śivadṛṣṭi, āhnika four. Somānanda argues that this denotative capacity is innate in words because based in a real sāmānya or universal; that a permanent connection links śabda and its object (artha), not convention (saṃketa); and that the referent of speech is an object innately imbued with linguistic capacity in the form of an ever-present, innate sāmānya. Each of these positions is also supported by the Mīmāṃsā, and Somānanda, citing both Śabara and Kumārila, assents to their positions on these points on the understanding that they may only be accepted as philosophically sound if one presumes the existence of a Śaiva non-duality of all as Śiva-as-consciousness. These positions, in turn, are all deployed as arguments against those of the Buddhist Pramāṇa Theorists, whose views in each of these three areas Somānanda contests.

This is the long-awaited third edition of Chomsky's outstanding collection of essays on language and mind. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic theory. This new edition complements them with an additional chapter and a new preface, bringing Chomsky's influential approach into the twenty-first century. Chapters 1-6 present Chomsky's early work on the nature and acquisition of language as a genetically endowed, biological system (Universal Grammar), through the rules and principles of which we acquire an internalized knowledge (I-language). Over the past fifty years, this framework has sparked an explosion of inquiry into a wide range of languages, and has yielded some major theoretical questions. The final chapter revisits the key issues, reviewing the "biolinguistic" approach that has guided Chomsky's work from its origins to the present day, and raising some novel and exciting challenges for the study of language and mind. n o a m c h o m s k y

translated from the French by Michael S. Allen and Rajam Raghunathan revised and with a new appendix (published: Leiden -Boston: Brill, 2011)

Cognitive linguistics began as an approach to the study of language, but it now has implications and applications far beyond language in any traditional sense of the word. It has its origins in the 1980s as a conscious reaction to Chomskyan linguistics, with its emphasis on formalistic syntactic analysis and its underlying assumption that language is independent from other forms of cognition. Increasingly, evidence was beginning to show that language is learned and processed much in the same way as other types of information about the world, and that the same cognitive processes are involved in language as are involved in other forms of thinking. For example, in our everyday lives, we look at things from different angles, we get up close to them or further away and see them from different vantage points and with different levels of granularity; we assess the relative features of our environment and decide which are important and need to be attended to and which are less important and need to be backgrounded; we lump information together, perceive and create patterns in our environment, and look for these patterns in new environments when we encounter them. As we will see in this volume, all of these processes are at work in language too.

Journal of Indian Philosophy, vol. 39, issue 4-5, Special issue on 14th World Sanskrit Conference, pp. 571–587, 2011.

In studies of Indian theories of meaning it has been standard procedure to examine their relevance to the ontological issues between Brahmin realism about universals and Buddhist nominalism (or conceptualism). It is true that Kumārila makes efforts to secure the real existence of a generic property (jāti) denoted by a word by criticizing Dignāga, who declares that the real world consists of absolutely unique individuals (svalaks : an : a). The present paper, however, concentrates on the linguistic approaches Dignāga and Kumārila adopt to deny or to prove the existence of universals. It turns out that in spite of adopting contrasting approaches they equally distinguish between the semantic denotation of a word and its pragmatic reference to a thing in the physical world. From a purely semantic viewpoint, Dignāga considers the exclusion (apoha) of others by a word as the result of a conceptual accumulation of the sense-components accepted in the totality of worldly discourse. Among the three characteristics Dignāga held must be met by universals, Kumārila attaches special importance to their entire inherence in each individual (pratyekaparisamāpti / pratyekasamavāya). This is because he pragmatically pays attention to the use of a word in the discourse given in a particular context (prakaran : a) by analyzing a sentence into a topic and a comment.

Pratidhwani, the echo, 2019

'What is meaning'? This is a topic of interest for linguists, philosophers, Computational linguists and those who deal with NLP, Artificial Intelligence etc. How does a Natural language convey efficiently the ideas from speaker to listener? This topic is studied here, based on the discussions available in Vakyapadiya, an ancient Sanskrit text. In modern linguistics 'word meanings' are analyzed often and the most famous theories are 'Referential theory, Ideational theory and truth-value theory. A very significant theory suggested by Vakyapadiya in this regard is the 'Akhandavakya sidhanta'-the sentence is the unit of language, and sentential meaning happens as a flash of understanding in the mind.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2004

This paper engages with Johaness Bronkhorst's recognition of a "correspondence principle" as an underlying assumption of Nāgārjuna's thought. Bronkhorst believes that this assumption was shared by most Indian thinkers of Nāgārjuna's day, and that it stimulated a broad and fascinating attempt to cope with Nāgārjuna's arguments so that the principle of correspondence may be maintained in light of his forceful critique of reality. For Bronkhorst, the principle refers to the relation between the words of a sentence and the realities they are meant to convey. While I accept this basic intuition of correspondence, this paper argues that a finer understanding of the principle can be offered. In light of a set of verses from Nāgārjuna's Śūnyatāsaptati (45-57), it is maintained that for Nāgārjuna, the deeper level of correspondence involves a structural identity he envisions between understanding and reality. Here Nāgārjuna claims that in order for things to exist, a conceptual definition of their nature must be available; in order for there to be a real world and reliable knowledge, a svabhāva of things must be perceived and accounted for. Svabhāva is thus reflected as a knowable essence. Thus, Nāgārjuna's arguments attacks the accountability of both concepts and things, a position which leaves us with nothing more than mistaken forms of understanding as the reality of the empty. This markedly metaphysical approach is next analyzed in light of the debate Nāgārjuna conducts with a Nyāya interlocutor in his Vigrahavyāvartanī. The correspondence principle is here used to highlight the metaphysical aspect of the debate and to point out the ontological vision of Nāgārjuna's theory of emptiness. In the analysis of the Vigrahavyāvartanī it becomes clear that the discussion revolves around a foundational metaphysical deliberation regarding the reality or unreality of svabhāva. In this dispute, Nāgārjuna fails to answer the most crucial point raised by his opponent-what is that he defines as empty?

Cognitive linguistics can offer an account not only of linguistic structure but also of a wide variety of social and cultural phenomena. The comprehensive account presented in this paper is crucially based and dependent on cognitive capacities that human understanders and producers of language possess quite independently of their ability to use language. By discussing the cognitive processes and the various linguistic, social and cultural issues they help us describe and explain, the author demonstrates that cognitive linguistics is far more than a theory of language; one can think of it as a theory of " meaning-making " in general in its innumerable linguistic, social and cultural facets.