Methods of Sentential Understanding in Indian Philosophy

Abstract

The means of language is to succeed a fruitful communication. A communication becomes fruitful when listener comprehends the speakers intended significance. At the point when a speaker and a listener have a common place with similar linguistic convention, speaker uses sentences to communicate something and listener grasps the intended meaning thereof by hearing the sentence. How the meaning is conveyed through sentence? Language is a tool through which knowledge of the speaker is transferred to the hearer. Hearing sentences from authentic person produces the cognition in hearer. Now the question is how the sentences become intelligible to a hearer. Before answering this question we should discuss briefly about what a sentence is. This paper is focused on nature of sentence. Is the collection of word-meaning sentence or is it beyond something that. There are two views in Indian philosophy about sentence. One is Akhaṇḍapakṣava̅ da and other is khaṇḍapakṣava̅ da. Akhaṇḍapakṣava̅ dins claim that sentences is used as a whole but not simply as isolated words. The sentence as a whole can express the exact intention of the speaker but isolated words cannot express the speaker’s intention in proper manner. According to khaṇḍapakṣava̅ din sentence is the collection of words that combine to express the meaning, and meaning of a sentence is dependent on the constituent word-meaning. They think that why we use a sentence for expressing something, the function of a sentence cannot performed by its constituent words if they stands as isolated.