The Concept of  ākupeyar  in Tamil Grammar A Historical and Comparative Perspective

This paper traces the history of the concept of the syntactic category ākupeyar ‘referent shifting noun’ in Tamil grammatical tradition and its transformation into a semantic category and the role of Sanskrit grammatical thoughts in the transformation. Theoretically limited number of ākupeyar s multiplies and the semantic (referential) shift between nouns becomes layered. A shared syntactic of ākupeyar with vēṟṟumai-p peyar ‘case carrying noun’ loses its importance when the discussion of the former turns to semantics. The discussion turns to the difference of the semantic shift in ākupeyar and the headless compound aṉmoḻittokai . In modern literary and other communication studies, ākupeyar is equated with trope.