Grammarians' view on sentence-meaning can best be interpreted with an analogy of 'painting'. A painting consists of different colour patches. Although a single colour patchis associated with other patches to apprehend the meaning of the picture, but independent of the associated patches, it does not convey anything except a colour mark (spot). Similarly, a word in a sentence does not convey anything on its own. But it assists to apprehend the meaning of a sentence when it is corroborated with other words of the sentence. Thus, sentence is the unit of meaning, not the individual word.

The Naiyāyikas and Bhatta school of Mimāmsā, on the other hand, advocated the doctrine 'abhihitānvyavāda', which counteracts the Bhartŗhari's conception of meaning by proclaiming the reason that individual words are the primal unit of meaning. This theory is familiarized as 'words plus syntax' theory (Siderits, 1985, 134). The supporters of this theory argue that one cannot understand the sentence if (s)he does not understand the meanings of the constituent words with which a sentence is composed. It is so because to know the meaning of a sentence is to grasp the objects and/or concepts that the constituent words of the sentence denote/depict. The objects and/or concepts may refer to the substance, quality, action, universal, etc. In addition to this, one needs to understand the tight-knit association among those objects/concepts to determine the meaning of a sentence. Thus, they claim that "the meaning of a sentence is a complex of word-meanings arranged in accordance with the syntactical relations which obtain among the constituent words" (Siderits, 1985, 134). For them, words are the building blocks of a sentence as like some meaningful colour patches are the building blocks of a picture. Thus, to claim meaning of a sentence is an integral and indivisible phenomenon is redundant.