granted The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship while working on his PhD; in 1971-72, he was admitted as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto; was selected as the Collitz Professor at the Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America at the University of Illinois (1978); was elected in 1984 and 1997 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, respectively; and served as President of the American Oriental Society from 1989-1990. He is also known as an authority on Gujarati, for which he has been honored with membership in the Gujarati Sāhitya Pariṣad. And, notably, on November 21, 2016, Cardona was awarded (along with Thai Princess, Maha Chakri Sirindhorn) the World Sanskrit Award from the Indian Council on Cultural Relations. These and other distinctions further attest to Cardona's stature in Indo-European studies and Indian grammatical theory. Research Background Cardona's career began in the 1950s and '60s as indological studies, especially studies in traditional Sanskrit grammar, burgeoned throughout the United States. Cardona entered the scene of indological studies at the closing of a disciplinary era dominated by the legacies of Bopp, Whitney, and Bloomfield ‒ which triad of thinkers had established a discipline that relied less upon, and on occasion pointedly opposed, native Indian tradition itself, in order to accomplish overtly historical and comparative objectives. Thus the emerging indological discipline of Cardona's early career differentiated itself by rejecting what it saw as the unappreciating and therefore skewed appraisal of Indian tradition by early Western indological tradition (i.e. comparative linguistics and, a bit later, philological indology), instead emphasizing an approach it characterized as historically descriptive interpretation of Indian thinkers and their works ‒ that is, to get at what Indian thinkers "sought to achieve in their writings, and how they went about doing it". The disciplinary orientations of both early and late Western indology remain discernable throughout Cardona's career, as when, in a methodological controversy, J.F. Staal characterizes Cardona as a historically motivated philologist, but identifies himself (Staal) as, above all, a linguist in the tradition of Whitney (with respect to Whitney's methodological approach). On the whole, Cardona has been widely recognized as a champion of the indology that seeks an interior ‒ if not a simply historical ‒ understanding of the intentions and aims of Indian grammarians. This is evidenced, for instance, by Cardona's sometimes unorthodox commitment to