Signless Signification in Ancient India and Beyond

The collected essays in this book are the result of a series of workshops held at the University of Cagliari in Italy. In this work, the authors aim at reconstructing the evolution of a key concept of traditional Indian grammar: Pāṇini’s zero. The book investigates how certain patterns of description account for exceptions in the currently presupposed one-to-one symmetry between the semantic and the phono-morphological level of language. This work also deals with some powerful mechanisms of rule extension, which are valuable for different contexts of rule arrangement, such as the ritual model. The interpretative model laid down in the introduction proves strong and suggestive enough to allow subsequent articles in the book to make incursions into other traditions and cultures. The potentialities of aniconic expression in the artistic field are explored, together with the outcomes of this theory.