Analyzing English Phrases from Pāṇinian Perspective

This paper explores Pān. inian Grammar (PG) as an information processing device in terms of ‘how’, ‘how much’ and ‘where’ languages encode information. PG is based on a morphologically rich language, Sanskrit. We apply PG on English and see how the Pān. inian perspective would deal with it from the information theoretical point of view and its effectiveness in machine translation. We analyze English phrases defining sup (nominal inflections) and tiṅ (finite verb inflections) and compare them with the notion of pada (an inflected word form) and samasta-pada (compound) in Sanskrit. Sanskrit encodes relations between nouns and adjectives and nouns in apposition through agreement between gender, number and case markers, whereas English encodes them through positions. As a result, constituents are formed. It appears that an English phrase contains more than one pada, hence, cannot be similar to a pada. However, we show the linguistic similarities between a pada, samasta-pada and ‘phrase’.