  While proponents of the sphoṭa (or “bursting forth”) theory had urged that we must, in this regard, posit the sudden dawning of something akin to a unitary proposition (which might, indeed, be taken as the sense of the word sphoṭa in this context), Kumārila instead argued that understanding—whether of sentences, or just of individual words—can be explained with reference to memory of discrete phonemes, and that reference to anything over and above the phonemes was therefore unnecessary. Similarly, Kumārila eschewed the holistic account of sentence-meaning—called anvitābhidhānavāda, the doctrine that a sentence is “the expressed meaning of a series [of words]” (per Brough, 1953, 416)—advanced by Prabhākara, who would argue that complete sentences represent the basic unit of meaning. Instead, Kumārila held the so-called abhihitānvayavāda doctrine—the view that a sentence is “a series of expressed word-meanings” (Brough, 416)—on which sentence-meaning is essentially analyzable in terms of word-meanings that are independently intelligible. Against, then, the kind of holistic view on which the sense of a word is to be known chiefly from substitution in sentences, Kumārila argued (just as he had against the sphoṭa theory) that “as the words are uttered in a sentence, each word performs its task of expressing its meaning, and the sentence is the summation of these meanings.” (Brough, 415; see, as well, Kunjunni Raja 1963, Matilal 1990, Siderits 1991.)