Levels in Pāṇini’s Aṣṭ hādhyā yī

Abstract

In 1969 Kiparsky and Staal proposed that Pāṇini’s Aṣṭ hādhyā yī contained a four-level hierarchy of rules. While modifying the interrelation of the levels, Kiparsky (2002) still maintains the four-level hierarchy. R. Rocher (1964: 51) and Cardona (1976: 215-224) argued against such a hierarchy, the former maintaining that Pāṇini operated just with a two-level hierarchy of meaning and speech. Cardona was willing to accept the propriety of speaking of one intermediate level on the grounds that the assignment of kāraka terms involved both semantic and cooccurrence conditions. The present paper clarifies the issue, argues that the assignment of abstract l-affixes to the same level as kāraka classification by Kiparsky is problematic, that most rules considered to be purely phonetic (sandhi rules) in fact include morphological conditions and concludes that although there are intermediate stages in derivation, Pāṇini considers there to be just two levels. The semantic and syntactic levels are properly coalesced in a syntacticosemantic level and the abstract morphological and the morphophonemic level are properly coalesced in a single morphophonemic level.