Pāṇini’s Semantic Hierarchy, or How to Remove the Commentarial Dust from A 2.3.15

In the Indian grammatical tradition, the semantic values ascribed by Pāṇini to the infinitival suffix -tum (notably, ‘agent’, ‘purpose’, ‘future’) were disputed by his commentators. In particular, Patañjali argued that-tum denotes ‘action’ (bhāva-) instead of ‘agent’. In the present contribution I provide fresh evidence in favor of Pāṇini’s original account of the semantic values of -tum. I also show how the issue of determining the denotation of -tum, far from being the purview of a handful of erudite historians of linguistics, reveals a fine-grained theory of argument structure—with several hierarchically organized meaning components—that can fruitfully interact with, even inform, the modern language sciences.