Singling out the place where rules apply: materials from the discussion on Pāṇini’s description of substitution

This paper aims at taking Pāṇini’s substitution descriptive method out of its supposed limited domain of allomorphy (Kiparsky 2009: 86), to show that it is rather part of a broader conceptualization of linguistic units in spatial terms, i.e. as “places” where “things” i.e. linguistic phenomena described by rules, happen (following the lead indicated by Kahrs (1998: 184)). In particular, while discussing on the thirteen doṣavārttikas (vts. 18–30) on A. 1.1.56, by mainly relying on the textual dimension of the Aṣṭādhyāyī and on the usus scribendi of the author, we advanced that Pāṇini's linguistic units are not endowed with a mandatory fixed status, a misunderstanding which instead prevented ancient and modern interpreters (e.g. Joshi and Roodbergen 1985, 1990) from solving these supposed shortcomings in the mechanism of substitution. On the contrary, he might have envisioned the different units as scalar categories, whose prototypes were verbal bases and affixes on the one hand and the single meaningless phoneme on the other. Consistently, Pāṇini's explicit classification of rules again is not abstract and functional but based upon the explicit mention of a relevant linguistic “place” and the way in which it is, each time, described: Pāṇini's strategy encompasses both devices to shift the status of a linguistic unit from phone to morph and vice versa.