Sanskrit Grammar Model

I offer these notes in the spirit of starting imperfectly, aiming first for clarity so as to be correctable, and second for improvements that fix flaws and add to coverage and insight, so that some day it may become a more comprehensive, accurate, simple, and useful theory. As bad as they may be, they can be improved.

Instead of the Chomsky approach of proposing before the start whole constellations of more or less unbelieveable assumptions, let's start with fewer, by staying close to the explicit forms found, here, in the grammar of Sanskrit.

Now a beginning Sanskrit student like myself might think of its grammar or language model as a conversational, text-emitting, system or transducer or computer which contributes conversationally to shared thinking via speech acts.

While transcription makes speech concrete, the invisible enabling machinery and process from which speech emerges may itself hardly be described. We can say that the action of speech emerges downstream from thoughts which may be ineffable, emotionally colored, half-glimpsed, distracted, or over-imagined:

ineffable because, who knows what's in there and how it starts,
emotionally colored because cognition is always emotionally colored
half-glimpsed because we don't know everything even about what we are trying to think and talk about
distracted because we may not even be paying attention in the insight-generating direction, or
over-imagined because we might have too much detail to be able to immediately put into words.

Thoughts, whatever they are, may be by parts elaborated or suppressed, distorted or shoe-horned into relevantly evoked, definitely-meaningful structures holding in them concretely informative elements recognizeable by all participants as partly of shared contextual knowledge and partly as speaker-unique information. Those details and excess details and dreamy vaguenesses and preconcieved structural distortions are somehow transduced into a speakable form by some kind of evocation, which amounts to selection and combination and surfacing of four or five levels or kinds of elements with their logical (semantic) combination and their grammatical cospecification.

These elements in this model ...

... are Explicit because the actually-pronounced elements define a model; all the model's elements are not just indicated in the implicit abstractions of grammatical ideas but actually marked with bits of words that get spoken. At least then we are talking about something for sure real.
... constitute Speech as Action, implicitly, tautologically: the model's existence is simply to say that a speaker's Action is communicating to an audience by delivering to them an Utterance comprised of these elements, its parts. H, H, H.
... are partly themselves Social in that, at least, grammar requires of a Verb that it marks its subject's social role, whether as Speaker (1st person), Addressee (2nd person), or Other(s) (3rd person).
... come in certain categories or Levels, namely, Utterance, Sentence, Verb, Noun, Adjective defined as follows and further modified by or combined with each other:
- The basic speech act is an Utterance. An Utterance might call out the addressee (Hey Joe!), or deliver to them a Sentence. (That is, many but not all Utterances are Sentences.)
- A Sentence includes, is built around, a Verb, with its required features.
- A Verb becomes further specified in different required or optional ways
  - By specification: expressing speaker's intention as to verbal mode whether to inform, speculate, or order, and verbal time whether past (5 past tenses), present, or future, etc.
  - By cospecification: choosing based on the verb's subject's Person (1p, 2p, 3p) and Number (Sg, Du, Pl), the corresponding inflection from the grammar-specified verb paradigm.
  - By combination including
    - First by filling a number of roles with Nouns (or Sentences with verbs of saying).
    - Second by Verbal modifiers such as temporal adverbial clauses, like "WHILE WALKING he saw roses."
    - Third by adverbs, the "other" category of words that lack the grammatical markings required for verbs or nouns ("indeclinables")
- A Noun is also further specified in different ways
  - First, by its grammatically required markings (Vibhakti) for (7) Cases, (3) Numbers, and (3) Genders.
  - Second by Adjectives.
  - Third by additional Nouns (creating N N compounds).
  - Fourth by verb-including constructs like subordinate clauses (the puppy THAT WE SAW), gerunds (the WANDERING puppy), past participials (the LOST puppy), etc.
  - and ...?
- An Adjective modifies a Noun and is grammatically marked with the same case as its head Noun.

In other words:

A Sentence is a Verb optionally draped about with Nouns which take different roles inside or with the Verb, each marked by one of 7 cases.
Nouns can be further modified (by Adjectives).
Further modifications are available at the levels of Action, Verb, and Noun.
The Action is modified by specifying its addressee in the Vocative case, plus non-sentential elements like "Hey!" or "Fire!" or melodies with their own separate meaning, such as the Vocative Chant.
The Verb which starts with a root verb is often modified by stem formation from the root, then further conjugated by Subject Number (Singular, Dual, Plural) and Subject Person (1st 2nd 3rd) in a variety of indicating, speculating, and demanding arrangements including five or six past tenses and the present indicative, the speculative of future and desiderative, and required or optional demands of imperative and optative. In addition Verbs are modified by case-marked Nouns, also by the Other category of Indeclineables, call them Adverbs, but also by other Verbal constructions.
The Noun is modified by Adjectives, other Nouns, and Verbal structures such as Gerunds.

Not bad for a start. I need to review and reconstruct my summaries of Verb constructions and Noun compounds, and see those fit in here.