Is P¯an.ini’s grammar prescriptive or descriptive, or perhaps both at the same time? The answer determines, among many other things, how we should render v¯a and vibh¯as.¯a in his optional rules. If the grammar is prescriptive, these terms can mean “preferably” and “marginally”. If it is purely..

tory of Electronics, MIT, 1966. Über den deutschen Akzent, Studia Grammatica 7.69-97, 1966. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin. A propos de l’accentuation du grec ancien, Langages 1967, 73-93. A Phonological Rule of Greek, Glotta 44.109-134, 1967. Sonorant Clusters in Greek, Language 43.619-635, 1967. Tense and Mood in Indo-European Syntax. Foundations of Language 4, pp. 30-57, 1967. Syntactic and Semantic Relations in P¯an.ini (with J.F. Staal). Foundations of Language 5, pp. 83-117.

persusasions are in addition impressed by its remarkable conciseness, and by the rigorous consistency with which it deploys its semi-formalized metalanguage, a grammatically and lexically regimented form of Sanskrit. Empiricists like Bloomfield also admired it for another, more specific reason, namely that it is based on nothing but very general principles such as simplicity, without prior commitments to any scheme of “universal grammar”, or so it seems, and proceeds from a strictly synchronic perspective. Generative linguists for their part have marveled (...) especially at its ingenious technical devices, and at intricate system of conventions governing rule application and rule interaction that it presupposes, which seem to uncannily anticipate ideas of modern linguistic theory (if only because many of them were originally borrowed from P¯. (shrink)