Abstract
This article reviews the impact of modern theoretical views on our understanding of the nature and purpose of the grammar of Pāṇini (ca. 350 BCE), and argues that new possibilities for progress open up for our understanding of this ancient grammar by confronting it not with the presuppositions of generative grammar as has been done - with undeniable but limited theoretical profit – in the last few decades, but with recently developed theories of construction grammar and cognitive linguistics. This, in turn, provides new perspectives on old problems in the study of Pāṇinian grammar, and especially on the challenge of its computerization. The present article focuses on general technical aspects of Pāṇini’s grammar and is the counterpart of a recent study on the earliest available elaborate theory of Pāṇini’s grammar, the one formulated by the grammarian-philosopher Bhart.hari (5th cent. CE).
Because of the limited time available for writing this article I have to refer to earlier publications (Houben 1999, 2003, 2006, 2008a, 2008b) for the substantiation of some of my points with detailed examples from the works of Pāṇini and Pāṇinīyas. A brief discussion of Pāṇini and his predecessors and successors, not only in their intellectual but also in their social and cultural contexts, is given in Houben 1997.
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Houben, J.E.M. (2008). Pāṇini’s Grammar and Its Computerization: A Construction Grammar Approach. In: Kulkarni, A., Huet, G. (eds) Sanskrit Computational Linguistics. ISCLS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5406. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-93885-9_2
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