ABSTRACT
To my own surprise, this paper deals with Staal's work on ritual, in particular with Staal (1989) rather than e.g. his work on Indian logic and linguistics, as e.g. Staal (1988). I know virtually nothing about Indian rituals except for what I read about them in Staal (1983; 1989), so I will not say very much about them. However, one of Staal's leading hypotheses (roughly) says that rituals should be studied as rules without meaning. It is even a motto capturing a leading idea in his work on Indian rituals and mantras, namely that one should study them without appealing to meaning. This thesis presupposes a strict distinction between syntax and semantics. This strictness shows up in the possibility to study syntax without any appeal to semantics, whereas the rverse is not possible, of course, because the meaning of an expression is dependent on the expression.
