Sanskrit grammar had been drawing attention of grammarians of yore, even before it was certified by Panini in 500 B. C. and commentaries, from eminent grammarians, on it continued for many centuries thereafter too. Moreover, in the ensuing centuries there emerged many grammarians who modelled their works on MIA languages after the Paninian grammar.
In modern times, however, for the last few centuries, it has been drawing attention of many western scholars, with sound understanding of classical languages, as well as of the modern techniques of linguistic analysis. These multidimensional approaches of grammatical analyses have thrown considerable light on various aspects of Sanskrit grammar, which otherwise were little known earlier, especially the area of semantics.
The present monograph on 'Mood and Modality' by Ms. Renu Kapila is a welcome addition to the long list of Sanskrit grammatical treatises with a semantic angle. There in it the investigator has meticulously explained various aspects of tenses and moods as envisaged by Sanskrit grammarians of the yore. Their discussions on the grammatical aspects like 'external' and 'internal' negation's, 'semantic question' and 'grammatical question', 'different shades of meanings expressed by moods', subtle distinctions in meanings of moods which otherwise may be interchangeable, syntactically and structurally', 'role of context in determining the purport of the modal form' etc. are noteworthy. The investigator has rightly concluded that 'the analysis of the Sanskrit data has given useful insight into the diverse shades of meaning expressed by the moods and the tendencies in their usage in Classical Sanskrit'.
I am sure, this treatise will receive due recognition from scholars of Sanskrit and Linguistics.
This study was done as a part of requirement for the fulfilment of M. Phil. degree at the University of Cambridge in England in 1987 under the supervision of Dr. (Mrs) Vivien A. Law, Dept. of Linguistics.
This work is a study of mood and modality in classical Sanskrit and English. The main objectives are:-
(a) To investigate the diverse uses of moods in classical Sanskrit by analysing the data compiled by me.
(b) To compare the system of mood in classical Sanskrit with that of modal auxilaries in English.
The field of modality in semantics is very complex and ambiguous. Palmer has aptly remarked that the fact that different scholars have dealt with modals and modality in so many different ways is a clear indication of the complexity of the issues involved and of the difficulty of arriving at any completely simple and completely convincing analysis'.
The difficulty of my present task can be understood by the fact that little work has been done in this field in classical Sanskrit. A few works that can be mentioned are "The Character of the Indo-European Moods' by Gonda and 'The Inflectional Categories of Indo-European' by Kurylowiez but these are not particularly useful from the semantic point of view. However, the former proved useful to some extent. It is noteworthy that it does not specifically, deal with classical Sanskrit; it takes a general view of Vedic and classical Sanskrit. In a sense, I had to start from scratch in this field in Sanskrit and explore it on my own. However, in the field of modality, I have availed myself of the pioneering works done by Lyons and Palmer. d I have taken Lyons' definition of modality as a starting point and later, it is the model set up by Palmer which has been taken as a basis for the comparison between English and classical Sanskrit.noizzalo Both the languages in question classical Sanskrit and English-are the members of the Indo-European family of languages but, Sanskrit (more specifically) belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. However, they both are two different languages. What is striking is, that English is very much in use at present, whereas Sanskrit exists only in its written form. Though no longer a spoken language, Sanskrit exhibits an excellent and fully developed grammatical system... The main interest of this research study lies in the system of mood Sanskrit has. Then we shall see how modality is expressed in Sanskrit as compared to English which has the system of modal altow wol A tidens verbs ('will', 'can', 'may', 'must', etc.)!
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