Semantic Processing in Pāṇini’s Kāraka System

Pānini's grammar is widely known for its formal treatment of the Sanskrit language. Many scholars Jha 2004 have earlier taken a systemic view of Pānini and have argued that Pānini's system is easily implementable. However, on a closer look, several complications arise, especially in Pānini's recourse to semantics in many of the vidhi and saṁjnā. rules. This seems to happen more in the kāraka prakaraa than in other components. The authors of this paper have highlighted the challenges in implementing some of the semantic aspects of Pānini's kāraka system. For example, the semantic conditions of being most desired by the agent (karturīpsitatamam ) and of being most effective (sādhakatamam ) are difficult to formalize in the rules specifying the semantic conditions for an object's being termed karman and karana respectively. Likewise, the semantic conditions of being that which the agent approaches with the direct object (karmanā yamabhipraiti ), and being the one pleased in relation to verbs of pleasing (rucyarthānā m prīyamā nah ) are difficult to formalize in rules specifying semantic conditions for an object's being termed sampradāna. The paper also looks at possible strategies to handle such situations, and presents pseudo-code like translations of some kāraka rules.