Aesthetic theorists focus on the psychology of the poet and the hearer, in part to understand the relationship between ordinary language and poetic language, but also to distinguish among the varieties of poetic utterances. Among the psychological principles widely accepted by Indian thinkers is that ordinary conventional meanings are stronger than analytically-determined ones (Raja 1969). So the term paṅka-ja has constituent parts which together mean “mud-born” but conventionally it refers to the lotus, and the latter meaning would come to a hearer’s mind first. Aesthetic philosopher Mukula Bhaṭṭa argues in his Fundamentals of the Communicative Function (Abhidhāvṛttamātṛkā) that some words become so conventionalized that their status as secondary meaning is unavailable to the speaker, who takes herself to be speaking literally (McCrea 2008, Keating 2019).