In the previous chapter, I have discussed how the tradition has misinterpreted 1.4.2 vipratiṣedhe paraṁ kāryam. In this section, I lay the conceptual foundation that will help us understand the actual meaning of 1.4.2 in the next section (2.2).
Over a period of time, I studied different examples in which two vidhi sūtras ‘operational rules’ are simultaneously applicable at the same step of a derivation, from both traditional sources and modern literature. Henceforth, we will refer to such interaction between two simultaneously applicable operational rules as ‘Same-Step Rule Interaction’, or simply SSRI. I tried to divide these examples into different groups on the basis of the similarities between them.
In my opinion, at any step in a derivation, even though two (or more) rules are applicable, only one rule applies. So, I attempted to determine if, of the two competing rules, a certain kind of rule always prevails over the other rule, in all the examples of that group. In other words, I came up with one generalization per group about the result of such competition between rules. The generalization that I made for one particular group of rules immediately caught my attention. In order to highlight the common property that binds together the examples of this group, first, I need to explain certain concepts, which I will do in this section. In section 2.2, I will discuss the said group of examples, and how this group of examples led me to discover the actual meaning of 1.4.2.
Consider the two types of SSRI:
Type 1: ( R1A R2A →) A + B
Type 2: (RA→) A + (RB→) B
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We will call Type 1 Same Operand Interaction - henceforth SOI - because both rules R1A and R2A are applicable to the same operand A at the same step. We will call Type 2 Different Operand Interaction - henceforth DOI - because the two rules RA and RB are applicable to two different operands A and B respectively at the same step.
In their efforts to understand the meaning of 1.4.2, both traditional and modern scholars have failed to make good use of this clear distinction between SOI and DOI.1 Going further, we will see that this distinction plays a critical role in helping us understand Pāṇini’s key rule 1.4.2 and, consequently, the entire derivational system of the Aṣṭādhyāyī.
As stated before, in my opinion, at any step in a derivation, even though two (or more) rules are applicable, only one rule applies. So, for both Type 1 and Type 2, we need to determine which of the two rules should be applied at the given step.
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Cardona (1970: 48) does recognize this distinction:
“the general condition for vipratiṣedha is, as noted…that two rules tentatively apply to provide operations which cannot possibly take place concurrently. The two operations can involve
(a) a single operand or
(b) different operands.”But he does not develop this intuition, relying instead on the traditional approach to rule interaction. ↩︎