maintained the view (since the debate began) that the kārakas are essentially linguistic, syntactic-semantic categories ‒ not non-linguistic or extra-linguistic ones as put forth by Rocher and Al-George on the basis of a lack of correspondence between the Indian notion of 'agent,' a kind of kārakas, and a fixed linguistic expression (compare the correspondence between the grammatical category of 'subject' and its linguistic expression, the nominative). A subset of this debate is Al-George's claim that kārakas issue from "Vedic ritual categories," which Cardona has criticized greatly. Whereas Al-George's supplies extraneous elements to his analysis of the kārakas (he invokes European structuralism), Cardona's position is rooted in Pāṇini's text itself. General linguistics and Indian grammatical tradition Beginning in the '60s, attempts at formalization of the Aṣṭādhyāyī developed. These attempts at formalization entailed the comparison of modern Western and ancient Indian grammatical traditions. Since formalizing Pāṇinian rules also amounts to translating them into a different language, so to speak, scholars such as Cardona explored the issue of how ‒ or even whether ‒ comparisons of this sort could be carried out. On this matter, Cardona is well known for having said: "I do not think we have yet arrived at a sufficiently detailed understanding of Indian grammatical methods to make a comparison with Western methods truly useful. After such an understanding has been attained, it will be both welcome and valuable to make comparisons." Back and forth with Staal on this point elicited a spirited response in Staal (1967). Staal attributes to Cardona a scholarly approach that is "historically" informed, and identifies him most essentially as a "philologist". On the other hand, Staal considers himself most essentially as a "linguist", approaching his subject "systematically". Staal then points out that "[t]he scope for mutual contradiction between these two approaches is fairly narrow". This narrow scope, nonetheless, evidently affords Cardona the opportunity to wonder whether Staal thought that Pāṇini "started from scratch" in his composition of the śivasūtras (thus, from Cardona's point of view, Staal was ignoring one of Cardona's central theses that Pāṇini was deeply indebted to the Indian grammatical tradition). Staal claims that Cardona has misinterpreted him. He then goes on to dispute, in fact, that there is not so much of a difference between himself and Cardona when it comes to studying the śivasūtras "in terms of 'the grammatical structure of the language' as analysed in the rules of the grammarians."