Description of शब्दानुगमः: Indian linguistic studies in honor of George Cardona. Volume 1: Vyākaraṇa and śābdabodha.

This is the first of two volumes of studies in honor of Professor George Cardona, the preeminent authority on Pāṇinian grammar and the linguistic traditions of India as well as one of the worlds leading scholars of Indo-European. In his 45 years of teaching at the University of Pennsylvania until his official retirement in 2005, and in his continued teaching and lecturing since then, Professor Cardona has influenced two generations of students, many of whom have become leading experts in linguistics and Indology in their own right, as well as other colleagues. Nineteen of these learned scholars have contributed eighteen studies to this volume. These studies cover topics in Pāṇinian grammar, other Indian linguistic traditions, issues in Sanskrit morphology and syntax, and theories of verbal cognition. Twenty-one additional learned scholars have contributed twenty papers to volume two on topics ranging from historical language change to philosophy and poetics.

This first volume includes a paper with ground-breaking research on variants in the text of Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī, several papers that illuminate principles of derivation (prakriyā) in Pāṇini's derivational system, papers that examine the correspondence between Pāṇini's description of Vedic and what is known from modern philological analysis of extant Vedic texts, papers that examine issues in compound formation, papers that examine Pāṇini's terminology including one paper that casts light on the persistent issue of the interpretation of terms for optional rules in the Aṣṭādhyāyī by examining the question of degrees of optionality in Pāli grammatical commentaries, papers that compare the evaluation of syntactic structures by several Indian linguistic schools, and a paper considering what constitutes an Indian linguistic school. The volume also includes four papers that deal with verbal cognition (śābdabodha) in Vyākaraṇa, Mīmāṁsā, Nyāya, and Alaṅkāraśāstra.

Most contributions are written in English, but the last is written in Sanskrit. The volume begins with a brief overview of Professor Cardona's career in the preface and ends with a complete bibliography of his nearly 250 publications in the appendix. The volume is equipped with a detailed table of contents, an index of passages cited in Vedic and classical texts, and an index of authors. The book is produced with the highest quality binding and linen-wrapped hard cover with a beautiful dust jacket.