 The tradition of grammarians, beginning with Bhartṛhari, seems to have followed a middle path between the realistic theories of reference (bāhyārthavāda) developed by Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and Mīmāṃsā on the one hand, and the notional/conceptual meaning (vikalpa) of the Buddhists on the other. For the grammarians, the meaning of a word is closely related to the level of understanding. Whether or not things are real, we do have concepts. These concepts form the content of a person’s cognitions derived from language. Without necessarily denying or affirming the external reality of objects in the world, grammarians claimed that the meaning of a word is only a projection of intellect (bauddhārtha, buddhipratibhāsa). The examples offered by Sanskrit grammarians such as “śaśaśṛṅga” (“horn of a rabbit”) and “vandhyāsuta” (“son of a barren woman”) remain meaningful within this theory. Sanskrit grammarians are thus not concerned with ontological or truth functional values of linguistic expressions. For them the truth of an expression and its meaningfulness are not to be equated.