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

Abstract

As K ātyāyana emphasizes while commenting on the ekaśeṣa-rules, words apply per object. Consequently,
no word should be capable of conveying more than one object. By contrast not only does
paronomasia, the so-called śleṣa, break the one-to-one relation between the śabda- and artha-levels
of language; there are also grammatical rules which look like deviations from the naturally expected
cause-effect relation between word forms and their meanings. T he ekaśeṣa-rule represents one of these
exceptions, since some parts of the artha are comprehensible, even without employing the word-form
denoting them, such as mātṛ in the dual noun pitarau, meaning ‘mother and father’ rather than ‘the two
fathers’. P atañjali already mentions an intriguing option in the use of śabdas, when he notes that a word
form can merely convey its primary denotation, such as candra denoting the ‘moon’, or can express
something that is ‘like something else’, such as candra conveying the sense of a ‘face like a moon’.
These exceptions are reconsidered here within the framework of the “yugapad-expression”, which is
how Bhartṛhari defines one of the two language options (the other one being kramaḥ ‘sequence’), an
option realised when a single word simultaneously conveys more than one meaning, but an option
whose use is discouraged.
Technical (ritual and grammatical) speculations on simultaneity as an exception to the bi-unique relationship
between a cause and its effect date back to the 2nd to 3rd centuries BC. N onetheless, grammarians
insist on excluding these extreme applications of meaning extension; only the late kāvyālaṃkāraśāstra-
authors extol the virtues of the phenomenon. T he paper focuses on the trajectory that might have
been followed in the intervening changes.