The Yugapad-Way Of Using Words: How a Linguistic Taboo Became a Crucial Literary Strategy

As K ātyāyana emphasizes while commenting on the ekaśeṣa-rules, words apply per object. Consequently,\udno word should be capable of conveying more than one object. By contrast not only does\udparonomasia, the so-called śleṣa, break the one-to-one relation between the śabda- and artha-levels\udof language; there are also grammatical rules which look like deviations from the naturally expected\udcause-effect relation between word forms and their meanings. T he ekaśeṣa-rule represents one of these\udexceptions, since some parts of the artha are comprehensible, even without employing the word-form\uddenoting them, such as mātṛ in the dual noun pitarau, meaning ‘mother and father’ rather than ‘the two\udfathers’. P atañjali already mentions an intriguing option in the use of śabdas, when he notes that a word\udform can merely convey its primary denotation, such as candra denoting the ‘moon’, or can express\udsomething that is ‘like something else’, such as candra conveying the sense of a ‘face like a moon’.\udThese exceptions are reconsidered here within the framework of the “yugapad-expression”, which is\udhow Bhartṛhari defines one of the two language options (the other one being kramaḥ ‘sequence’), an\udoption realised when a single word simultaneously conveys more than one meaning, but an option\udwhose use is discouraged.\udTechnical (ritual and grammatical) speculations on simultaneity as an exception to the bi-unique relationship\udbetween a cause and its effect date back to the 2nd to 3rd centuries BC. N onetheless, grammarians\udinsist on excluding these extreme applications of meaning extension; only the late kāvyālaṃkāraśāstra-\udauthors extol the virtues of the phenomenon. T he paper focuses on the trajectory that might have\udbeen followed in the intervening changes