On the trail of syntax in the Aṣṭhādhyāyī.

Driven by the religious intention of keeping the sacred Vedic texts intact, the Sanskrit grammar tradition is not only very ancient but also very important inasmuch as by the 5th century BCE the Indian grammarians had achieved scientific results unmatched by any one people of antiquity. After providing non-Sanskritist readers with a few introductory notions that would allow them to understand fully the role and significance of a grammatical tradition whose importance is generally recognized, the paper addresses the issue of syntactic analysis in Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī. Strange as it may seem, Pāṇini never gives a definition of sentence in his grammar. Nonetheless, a certain type of linguistic analysis, which today we would not hesitate to call syntactical, is certainly not lacking in the Aṣṭādhyāyī. Thereby, the last part of the paper focuses on the role dynamics of kartṛ and kārakas that can be observed in the sentences.