Śabda can alternatively denote language as such — the conditions of possibility for any utterance counting as linguistic — rather than particular utterance events

It is important to note, with respect to Kumārila’s characteristically Mīmāṃsaka intuitions about language, that the word śabda—which often means “word,” as in the fifth of Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā Sūtras, where it is relations between śabda and referents (artha) that are said to be primordial—is essentially ambiguous between what Saussure distinguished as langue and parole. Thus, the same word can also refer generally to “sound,” in the sense denoting any object of the auditory sense faculty. To that