This chapter introduces Pāṇini and the ancient Indian linguistic tradition more generally, provides an introduction to the interactions between ancient Indian linguistics and modern Western linguistics and the influence of the former on the latter, and provides a brief initial foray into detailed comparison of the two, by investigating the concept of the Saussurean 'sign' in modern linguistic thought and the concept of sphoṭa in ancient Indian thought.

This introductory chapter provides the rationale for the book, as well as its organization. As part of the linguistic landscape, public signage provides glimpses of a culture and its changes. The ability to read signs is a practical skill essential for daily survival in the target language environment. But there seems to have been a general neglect of signs in the typical Chinese language curriculum, even at advanced levels of instruction. This book aims to rectify the situation.

Chapter 2 begins with an outline of the four passages in which Aristotle introduces the three pillars of lexis and then moves on to two sections in which the first, i.e. ἅπασα λέξις (the entirety of lexis), is discussed. This first level of lexis includes the linguistic elements treated under the notion of lexis and Aristotle’s theory of language. These not only present Aristotle’s thoughts on language as an abstract system, but they also form the most fundamental level upon which the remainder of Aristotle’s thoughts on the concept of lexis are based.

Taking as an initial example Donald Trump’s promise to “build a wall” on the southern border of the United States to keep out undesirable immigrants, I take the symbol “wall” to show the four meanings that the term “symbolic” can have in its relation to language and power. The first is that language, like music or painting, is called a symbolic system because it is composed of signs and symbols that combine together in a rule-governed, systematic way to make meaning. The wall incident also gives us a glimpse into a second meaning of the term “symbolic,” namely the power of symbols to create semiotic relations of similarity, contiguity or conventionality with other symbols, that listeners interpret as such. The meanings given to the wall by the various actors are more or less conventional/arbitrary, more or less non-arbitrary or motivated by the actors’ desire to pursue their own political interests. The power to manipulate the meaning of signs and to impose those meanings on others and make them “stick” is a third aspect of symbolic power; it acts not through physical force but through our mental representations as mediated by symbolic forms. The fourth meaning of “symbolic” is the power to construct and perform a social reality that people believe is natural and given. The chapter discusses each of these four aspects of symbolic power – the power to signify, the power to interpret, the power to manipulate, the power to represent .

Chapter 7 appraises the language inference. It is the final component of the jewellery inference, the cave-art inference, the body-decoration inference and the deliberate-burial inference. It comprises one step: Certain Neanderthals had symbols → These Neanderthals had language. This inference fails all three soundness conditions. First, the conclusion that certain Neanderthals had language lacks pertinence: the entity central to this conclusion, language, is on the whole not clearly identified and adequately characterised in the literature. That is, language is not distinguished in a principled way from other linguistic entities, including linguistic capacity, language ability, linguistic skill, speech and communication. Second, the inferential step lacks uncontentious grounding: it has not been uncontroversially established that Neanderthals engaged in symbolic behaviours. The inferential step lacks an appropriate warrant: it moves in an arbitrary way from putative cultural symbols that cannot be semantically combined to linguistic signs that can be semantically combined, a distinction drawn in a principled way in the literature. So, the language inference is unsound.