The third chapter is the first to exclusively address core linguistic issues by comparison of the ancient Indian and modern Western traditions. It addresses rule interaction, an issue which has been a core topic of research in Pāṇinian linguistics, and which has also been a central issue in the development of modern phonological theory, in many respects driving theoretical developments over the last fifty years. A central focus is on the Elsewhere Principle, also known as 'Pāṇini's principle', and on the outworking of this fundamental principle in different phonological theories including Lexical Phonology, Declarative Phonology and Optimality Theory.

This chapter summarizes the contents and arguments of the preceding chapters, drawing together the major observations and implications of the work, in particular in relation to the influence and continuing relevance of Pāṇini and the ancient Indian linguistic tradition for modern Western linguistics.

This chapter introduces Pāṇini and the ancient Indian linguistic tradition more generally, provides an introduction to the interactions between ancient Indian linguistics and modern Western linguistics and the influence of the former on the latter, and provides a brief initial foray into detailed comparison of the two, by investigating the concept of the Saussurean 'sign' in modern linguistic thought and the concept of sphoṭa in ancient Indian thought.

This chapter investigates why Pāṇini has been called the world’s first computational linguist and situates Pāṇinian grammar within the context of formal language theory and issues of generative capacity, which have been of huge importance in the development of modern linguistic theory since Chomsky's earliest work. Existing claims regarding the generative capacity of Pāṇini’s system are shown to be inadequate, and a new assessment of the power of the Aṣṭādhyāyī is provided.

This chapter reviews all the assumptions deployed in Chapters 2–5 and indicates the specific roles played in the derivation of the requisite grammatical effects discussed therein. Bringing all the assumptions together in one place and showing what specific role they play in the derivations should allow dissenters to pick and choose what parts of the proposal they would like to keep and what to dump and the price of each move.

This chapter argues that labeling is the key linguistically bespoke operation. I trace the recursive property of Gs to the fact that they employ labels. The chapter argues that labels are the device for taking an expression in the range of Merge and putting it into the domain of Merge. Thus labels close Merge in the domain of the lexical atoms. So closing the operation effectively delivers a recursive system of unbounded hierarchy. The chapter also critically reviews some arguments for the simplicity of Merge based on the role it is intended to play in explaining the evolution of language. I dispute this and argue that what needs explanation is something quite different: What is the source of the power to form inductive definitions? Recursion is a consequence of closure afforded by labels.

This chapter discusses A’-chain binding effects, in particular pronominalization, resumption and long-distance anaphora. If the EMH/FPG is correct, these dependencies must be mediated by I-merge. A-chains are not expansive enough to cover such cases, so the chapter proposes that these dependencies live on A’-chains, or, more accurately, improper chains involving at least one A’-link. The virtues of the proposal are discussed. So too is the necessity of some such approach if we adopt a movement theory of reflexivization.

This chapter is based on earlier work on Obligatory Control and Reflexivization in terms of movement. The point here is not to rehash the arguments for movement approaches to control and reflexive binding but to illustrate how movement approaches to construal are consequences of the EMH incorporating the FPG. The EMH/FPG implies that the non-local relation between an antecedent and Obligatory Control PRO (OCPRO) and a reflexive must be mediated by I-merge. In other words, descriptively speaking, such construal relations must “live on” A-chains. As this is effectively what movement theories of OC and Reflexivization have argued, and as the EMH/FPG implies movement theories of both, insofar as such movement theories are successful, to that extent they support the encompassing EMH/FPG theory. I review some arguments showing that movement plausibly underlies such dependencies. However, the discussion is not exhaustive; it is mainly illustrative. The reader is referred to the considerable literature on both topics for the full-scale defense of these movement approaches.

This chapter argues for adding labeling to the combination operation, thereby returning to an earlier conception of Merge. The main motivation for this is that it allows one to strengthen the Merge Hypothesis by having Merge extend to all grammatical dependencies, not just the eight reviewed in Chapter 2. I dub this the Extended Merge Hypothesis (EMH). The core principle of the EMH is the Fundamental Principle of Grammar (FPG). FPG states that all grammatical dependencies must be Merge mediated. For example, selection, subcategorization, control, binding, case, etc. must all be licensed under Merge.