General Introduction

The present article is part of a wider project focusing on the function of absent elements and trying to answer this basic question: How can an absent element perform a function notwithstanding its absence? How come that an effect can be grasped in absence of its cause? Eventually, the question boils down to the status of absence. Is it a distinct category, as maintained by Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā authors (see Freschi 2010) or nothing more than the negation of presence, as maintained by Buddhist Epistemologists?

Grammarians and linguists are familiar with the idea of a function of the “absence” of morphemes which is currently called “zero”. Western linguists beginning with de Saussure's work of 1879 (Saussure 1879 [1878], see Pontillo 2002, pp. 559 ff.) have often postulated the existence of the so-called zero-morpheme where the actual perceptible linguistic form does not match its relevant semantic and syntactic content. They resorted to this device on the basis of a significant opposition pointed out between comparable morphological structures. By contrast, as elaborated by Al-George, the Indian linguistic zero is not a mere device adopted for a descriptive purpose (see also Pontillo 1999; Pontillo 2000 [2003], pp. 159 ff., Candotti and Pontillo 2012, § 2.2).

More in general, the answer to the problem will be the elaboration of a complex net which allows an element to be applied to a specific case, even though it is not explicitly there.