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La réflexion linguistique ancienne en Inde a su conjuguer l'analyse du sanscrit avec la conscience que la langue par laquelle on conduit cette analyse (le sanscrit) est différente de l'objet quelle examine. Bien que cette langue-outil trouve sa dimension dans le sanscrit artificiel des sütra, les aphorismes de la grammaire de Påñini, le discours métalinguistique n'est pas restreint au discours spécialisé: le parler commun abonde de notations métalinguistiques. Le présent travail se concentre sur les témoignages de l'école grammaticale de souche pâninéenne, en tâchant de retracer le parcours par lequel le métalangage est sorti du domaine de la linguistique ingénue pour devenir un objet de l'école.

This is the first publication to appear in a new series edited by the French Institute of Pondicherry. As the name itself suggests, the series is devoted to the commentarial genre, a genre that deeply shaped Indian intellectual and cultural history. The present volume is thus a kind of manifesto to be analysed not only for its specific contents but also against the background of the wider intellectual project it proposes. The series wishes to offer a range of annotated translations of commentaries, broadly defined as texts showing "a deep engagement with a problematic text or concept", and is open to commentaries coming from different domains, both technical and more literary ones. Precedence will be given to texts that have not been translated yet. Moreover, there are some strict indications when it comes to the form and organization of material. Each volume will comprise an introduction, the Sanskrit text, the translation and endnotes. The introduction is meant to present a summary of the flow of arguments, together with a brief explanation of the principal terms and concepts involved in the discussion. These guidelines already allow some important features of this project to clearly emerge. Commentarial tradition is not interpreted, in this frame, as a tool to access other texts or documents but as an intellectual product to be analysed and understood in its own right. Such an attitude is accompanied by a commendable concern for the actual accessibility of the data presented: as every Indologist perfectly knows, these texts were originally meant for readers who shared a wide background of debate topics, technical conventions and problem-solving routines, and they are characterised by a high degree of implicit information. This is even more the case in age-old commentarial traditions where later texts try to make sense of long lasting debates. In such fields, collaboration with scholars who still preserve these living traditions proves crucial. This series thus presents a unique mix of academic research and preservation concerns, which also characterizes other important productions from the Pondicherry School. In the writer's opinion, such a program could be

The present paper is targeted on three landmarks in the long story of the paribhāṣās’ development. Two of these landmarks descended from the earliest testimony of Vyākaraṇa meta-rules, i. e. those included in Pāṇini’s grammar (fifth–fourth century BCE), and one which has been handed down as the first independent collection of paribhāṣās and attributed to Vyāḍi. In particular a shift is highlighted between Kātyāyaṇa’s (third century BCE) integrative approach (vacana) and Patañjali’s (second century BCE) recourse to implicit paribhāṣās in the Aṣṭādhyāyī as a powerful hermeneutical tool. A shift that helps in interpreting the need for a validation and collection of implicit pāṇinian paribhāṣās as carried out by authors such as Vyāḍi.

The present paper is focused on the way VayÄ\u81karaá¹\u87as and Ä\u80laá¹\u83kÄ\u81rikas analysed a specific kind of karmadhÄ\u81raya compounds, taught in AṣṭÄ\u81dhyÄ\u81yÄ« 2.1.56 and 72 and later associated with the upamÄ\u81- and the rÅ«paka-figures respectively. On the basis of a fresh interpretation of the relevant grammatical sources, the authors try both to understand how the theorists involved them in their analysis and to reconstruct the several steps of the inquiries realized by the modern scholarship on this topic. Nonetheless their research is targeted on the interpretation of these two PÄ\u81á¹\u87ini rules and they conclude that these rules do not actually target similes and metaphorical identifications, but, on the one hand, A 2.1.55-56 deal with a functional pair of figurative compounds involving an upamÄ\u81na and an upamita, i.e. a reference standard and something which is benchmarked, and, on the other, A 2.1.72 closes a series of karmadhÄ\u81raya-rules, aimed at illustrating A 2.1.57. Furthermore, they exclude that PÄ\u81á¹\u87ini in A 2.1.55-56 used the term sÄ\u81mÄ\u81nya as a tertium comparationis, even though Patañjali had already advancedâ\u80\u94but eventually rejectedâ\u80\u94this interpretation