This chapter builds on the discussion of rule systems in the previous chapter and addresses a major issue in modern morphological theory: the opposition of morpheme-based and paradigm-based approaches to morphological systems. Historically, these two opposing approaches can be traced to two distinct origins: morpheme-based approaches developed in the West following contact with the morpheme-based Pāṇinian approach to grammar, and paradigm-based approaches reflecting the inheritance from traditional Hellenistic and Roman grammar. Stump’s four-way decomposition of approaches to morphological theory is explored, and Pāṇini’s position within this framework is reassessed.

This chapter addresses the major syntactic (and partly semantic) topic of argument structure. Argument structure alternations have been central in the development of syntactic theory since Chomsky’s original transformational approach to passivization, and particularly since Fillmore’s work on ‘Case’ relations. In Pāṇinian grammar, the kāraka system provides a highly sophisticated model of argument structure, which has influenced developments in the modern Western tradition, and which also differs from modern argument structure approaches in interesting ways. The kāraka system is explained and illustrated, and compared and contrasted with modern approaches to argument alternations.

This chapter provides a detailed explanation and illustration of how Pāṇini's grammar, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, works. It begins by providing an overview of the structure and contents of the grammar, including the various dependent texts such as the Śivasūtras. It then works through the full derivation of a simple Sanskrit sentence, explaining all the rules and processes required to derive the output prounciation given a meaning as input.

In this chapter the focus moves beyond Pāṇini’s grammar to address a topic of major concern within the broader Indian tradition: semantics. While some observations regarding semantics can be drawn from Pāṇini, for the most part semantics was treated as a separate field of inquiry within the Indian tradition until the early modern period. This chapter provides introductions to the traditions of semantic analysis in ancient India and the modern West, and a comparison of their approaches to one issue of central concern in semantic theory: compositionality.

Chapter 8 moves to the third strand of the Indian linguistic tradition (alongside ‘grammar’ and semantics): phonetic and phonological analysis. This strand of the Indian tradition has particular relevance to the modern Western concept of the ‘phoneme’, which has played a central yet controversial role in phonological analysis over the last century. Several criticisms of the phoneme concept have attributed its popularity in modern linguistics to the centrality of alphabetic writing in Western society, and some have pointed to India as a contrasting situation, where writing was never alphabetic. I show that in contrast to what is often assumed, the ancient Indian tradition of phonetic and phonological analysis depended on a concept essentially equivalent to the modern concept of a phoneme, despite not being influenced by an alphabetic (or indeed, originally by any) writing system.

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.