Introduction

All verbal messages are works of art. For each and every utterance that a speaker produces, there is an evaluation metric that extends beyond the notion of “grammaticality, " although we might not underscore that component in a social interaction. It is part of the metalanguage that Jakobson (1960) elucidates in his now monumental piece on linguistics and poetics. As Jakobson stated so powerfully “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination” (1960: 358). In this volume, the authors examine this shift from the axis of selection (syntagmatic) to the axis of combination (paradigmatic) in the grammars of South Asian languages.