Dispensing with zero in the analysis of Sanskrit bahuvrīhi: Resurfacing, testing and assessing Pāṇini’s model

In modern linguistics it is common to analyse bahuvrīhis as derived from an endocentric compound to which a zero suffix applies (Whitney 1889:501-502; Kiparsky 1982a:139; Gillon 2008:2-3). All these descriptions owe something to the systematization handed down to us by the later pāṇinian tradition. By contrast, the present contribution highlights how, despite his extensive use of zero devices, Pāṇini himself does not adopt any of them to explain bahuvrīhis. This study attempts to recover Pāṇini’s original handling of compound analysis, namely the fact that he does not focus on the head, but rather on the so-called upasarjana constituent, characterized in the source-phrase by a frozen case ending expressing the syntactic relation with another constituent of the compound. A frozen syntactic relation is furthermore established between one of the constituents and the denotatum of the whole compound, and is reflected in the case ending of the pronoun used (in the traditional analysis) to signify this relation. It is exclusively the syntactic meaning conveyed by this case ending that is assumed to explain the final meaning of the bahuvrīhi. Such an analysis scales back the importance of the endo- vs. exocentric polarity in the classification of typologies in compounding, in line with some quite recent achievement of contemporary linguistics (Scalise-Bisetto 2009: 45).