Studies in Sanskrit Syntax: A Volume in Honor of the Centennial of Speijer's Sanskrit Syntax.

Scharf, Peter M.

The present volume is devoted to encouraging and facilitating the study of Sanskrit syntax. The editor presents revised versions of fourteen papers read at two symposia that he organized to bring together scholars in various fields working on Sanskrit syntax: the Symposium on Sanskrit Syntax at the Eighth South Asian Languages Analysis [SALA] Roundtable in Urbana, Illinois, 29-31 May 1986, and the Second Symposium on Sanskrit Syntax at the Ninth SALA Roundtable in Ithaca and Syracuse, 5-7 June 1987. The volume contains two contributions each by Madhav Deshpande, Steven Schaufele, and the editor, as well as papers by Ashok Aklujkar, R. N. Aralikatti, Vit Bubenik, Stephanie Jamison, Brian Joseph, Jared Klein, K. Meenakshi and Bertil Tikkanen. The work includes an extensive bibliography (pp. 220-44) built upon the combined bibliographic papers Deshpande and Hock prepared for the Silver Jubilee volume of the Centre for Advanced Study in Sanskrit at Pune University (its most notable flaw being that the cumulative reference list on pp. 210-17 duplicates a number of its entries). Note a few supplements below.

The quality and subject matter of the papers varies greatly, as is to be expected in a collection of this kind. Deshpande well integrates the analyses of Paninian grammarians with pertinent questions of syntax in his two papers, "Paninian syntax and the changing notion of a sentence" (pp. 31-43), and "Paninian reflections on Vedic infinitives: On the meaning of tumartha." Meenakshi's "Genitive in Panini and in Epic Sanskrit" (pp. 145-52), on the other hand, does not succeed in penetrating the analyses of the Paninians he deftly dismisses. I fail to see how the label "ablative genitive" is more accurate than the rejected view that the genitive is used when karakas such as apadana (ablative) are not intended to be expressed by the speaker (avivaksita). Is one not tantamount to the other? Yet Meenakshi abruptly dismisses, without explanation, the interpretations of 2.3.50 sasthi sese given in the Mahabhasya and in the Kasika, while erring in his explanation of Panini's treatment of the nominative case. This is not surprising, since understanding Panini's provision of the sixth triplet of nominal terminations involves a clear understanding of his provision of the first triplet (see sub 2.3.50, Mbh. I:464.10-27). Meenakshi writes, "through 2.3.46, kartr is marked by the first or nominative case endings in the active, and karman by the same endings in the passive" (p. 146). This is incorrect: the correct view is given by Deshpande (p. 35), "Panini does not define the nominative as the case of the subject of the sentence, nor as the case of the agent of an active verb or patient of a passive verb. The nominative case according to the original system is added to an item if any semantic roles like 'agent' either do not remain to be expressed or do not need to be."

Aklujkar, very much at home in Paninian grammar and grammatical philosophy, ventures into a somewhat foreign medium when dealing with questions of syntax. His disappointing "Syntactic gleanings from Bhartrhari's Trikandi" (pp. 1-11), consisting of five pages of text, an equal number of pages of notes, and a page of general introduction to Bhartrhari, makes a series of unrelated impressionistic points and conveys little new information. Aklujkar repeats well-known ubiquities and reveals his unfamiliarity with the most basic and standard treatments of Sanskrit syntax. Underestimating what is "well known," he consequently overestimates his contribution. "My selection of syntactic features of the Vakyapadiya Vrtti ... is naturally determined by my impressions of what is commonly known about the syntax of Classical Sanskrit ..." (p. 2). Aklujkar continues: "It is well known that the connectives ca 'and' and va 'or' commonly occur at the end of the set of items they connect." He then introduces as a "subtlety" (p. 9 n. 9) the following:

If the second member of a pair joined by ca or va contains a qualifier (usually an attributive adjective), then ca or va is placed after that qualifier, not at the end of the whole second member. (p. 2)

Aklujkar (p. 3) advances another "subtlety" regarding ca:

I have sometimes wondered if there once was a difference of connotation between an expression of the type 'X ca Y ca' and an expression of the type 'X Y ca'.... The first type of construction was favored ... when two items clearly belonging to two different groups in the speaker's perception (especially items logically opposed to each other) were to be expressed together.

Speijer, already a century ago, in the very work in honor of which the present volume is published, accurately postulated these "subtleties." He writes (1886: 330 [section]422), concerning the connective particle ca:

It is as a rule subjoined to the word annexed, as ramo laksmanas ca, but if it annexes a complex of words or a whole sentence, it is affixed to the first word, as pita matus ca svasa (father and mother's sister) ... this order seldom inverted in prose, oftener in poetry.

In poets, ca is not rarely put to each of the members connected.... But if it is necessary to state that the same thing is endowed with different qualities, etc. at the same time, this idiom is also used in prose.

Nor does the standard Sanskrit reference grammar provide the grounds for Aklujkar's misimpression of what is commonly known concerning the placement of connectives. For Whitney's Sanskrit Grammar (1924:417 [section]1133) describes the use of ca and va as "never having the first place in a sentence or clause." Even Coulson's introductory Sanskrit text (1976: 37) states that ca "cannot stand as the first word in its sentence or clause.... When it connects a whole phrase it may (unlike que) be placed at the very end of the phrase rather than after the first word."

Aklujkar's impression that "parenthetical clauses are rare in Sanskrit expository prose" (p. 6) is baseless. His evaluation of qualifiers in the genitive is also unsatisfactory. He cites (p. 4) two examples (nos. 9-10) each of which he claims illustrates a genitive linked with both a preceding and a following noun.

But in the first, the genitive is clearly linked with the preceding noun, and in the second, with the following. The double senses he speaks of should rather be explained by suppletion than by "a kind of slesa or play on meaning."

Treatment of the syntax (or any feature) of a special text calls for the linguist to relate the features proper to the text to features of the language in general (or a recognized subset of it). Aklujkar would have done better to focus more narrowly on any one of the several features he discusses, trim his examples more closely and compare them more carefully to examples in other texts. The evidence he cites fails to establish that the Vrtti has a distinctive style and fails to make known previously unknown features characteristic of expository prose.

In contrast, Jamison's "Syntax of direct speech in Vedic" (pp. 95-112) admirably demonstrates "the value for the study of the Vedic language as a whole, of isolating smaller corpora of stylistically unified discourse and examining their properties" (p. 108). She shows the prevalence of a hitherto unnoticed distinction in the use of the particles eva and vai in mythological direct speech versus in narrative prose. Similarly, Bubenik's "Nominal and Pronominal objects in Sanskrit and Prakrit" (pp. 19-30) shows that analysis of word order must take into account both the genre of the literature and the function of the expression.

I cannot discuss all the papers included in this volume. However, let me at least mention the high-point of the book, Klein's excellent paper, "Syntactic and discourse correlates of verb-initial sentences in the Rigveda" (pp. 123-43). He identifies eight aspects of the surrounding discourse structure that are correlated with the fronting of verbs, including contexts for the use of the imperative, rhetorical repetition, juxtaposition of sentence-initial verb with sentence-final, correlation between an event referred to in the hymn and an action in the yajna, introduction of a quotation, abrupt transition, etc. He supplies an exact description of the characteristics and extent of his large sample, precise statistics concerning each correlate identified, and ample examples to round off his thorough treatment of the topic.

Given what Hock notes in his introduction, that contributions to the study of Sanskrit syntax published in different journals and presented at very different professional meetings are often unnoticed or inaccessible to others working in the area, the current volume is a welcomed and useful collection.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cardona, George: 1988. Panini: His Work and its Traditions, vol. 1: Background and Introduction. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

Coulson, Michael. 1976. Sanskrit: An Introduction to the Classical Language. Kent: Hodder and Stoughton.

Sharma, Rama Nath. 1987. The Astadhyayi of Panini, vol. 1: Introduction to the Astadhyayi as a Grammatical Device. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal.

Shastri, Charu Deva. 1990. Panini Re-Interpreted. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

Whitney, William Dwight. 1924. Sanskrit Grammar, 5th ed.

Leipzig. [1st ed., 1879].

PETER M. SCHARF BROWN UNIVERSITY