Whether in the form of words or sentences, language has capacities—it can refer to things, cause mental cognitions, impel action, prompt emotional states, and so on. That such an ability exists is accepted by everyone, although thinkers enumerate the linguistic capacities differently, and also identify different results for them. In terms of outcomes, the meaning which results from the most fundamental linguistic capacity of the word is said to be “principal” (mukhya) or “denoted” (abhidhā). This meaning is sometimes defined in terms of its being understood immediately after speech, by hearers. (The extent to which the phenomenology of language comprehension guides distinctions about meaning is addressed further below.) For some philosophers, from the cognition that this meaning causes, another linguistic capacity can subsequently operate, given certain conditions, to generate a new, “secondary” meaning. This further meaning is sometimes carved into two varieties: indication (lakṣaṇā) and qualitative expression (gauṇavṛtti), something like metonymy and metaphor respectively, although this is to generalize over distinctions important especially in Aesthetics. Two other capacities are sometimes adduced: purport (tātparya) and suggestion (dhvani), which we will examine more closely below. Initially, let us characterize the first as something like speaker’s intention and the second as encompassing phenomena such as connotations and implicatures which the other capacities putatively cannot explain. In English scholarship, the first two of these four capacities are referred to as “primary” and “secondary,” and this article will follow this convention.