Innovation in Seventeenth Century Grammatical Philosophy: Appearance or Reality?

This paper argues that the grammarians Bha??oji Dīk?ita and Kau??a Bha??a did innovate in the realm of grammatical philosophy, without however admitting or perhaps even knowing it. Their most important innovation is the reinterpretation of the spho?a. For reasons linked to new developments in sentence interpretation (?ābdabodha), in their hands the spho?a became a semantic rather that an ontological entity.