Binary Structure of Pāṇini’s Treatment of Syntax

Maria Piera Candotti

;Tiziana Pontillo

2026-01-01

---

Abstract

Pāṇini’s treatment of syntax is a domain that is still in need of further study. It is well known that Pāṇini makes almost no use of the notion of vākya, even though he is aware of it. On the contrary, to account for a certain number of syntactic phenomena (whether case syntax or sentence syntax), Pāṇini makes use of a set of tools that he in fact shares with the description of morphological phenomena. In this article, we wish to underline the fluidity with which Pāṇini handles these two categories by means of the same two basic operations (affixation and substitution) and the same series of semantic-syntactic relations. On the contrary, the metarule A 2.1.1 and the heading rule A 2.3.1—partially read here in an innovative manner—seem to be more markedly related to syntax and might have governed Pāṇini’s whole syntactic system.