This study examines yogyatā, the principle of semantic fitness articulated in the Nyāya school of Indian philosophy, and evaluates its relevance to contemporary theories of semantic plausibility in linguistics and cognitive science. Nyāya maintains that meaningful sentence comprehension requires more than syntactic expectancy (ākāṅkṣā) ; lexical items must also satisfy constraints of semantic compatibility. The paper adopts a conceptual--comparative methodology to analyze classical Nyāya accounts of sentence meaning (śābdabodha) alongside modern constraint-based and connectionist models of language processing, including research on semantic anomaly detection and neurocognitive findings such as the N400 response. The analysis demonstrates that both traditions recognize a principled distinction between grammaticality and meaningfulness, although they differ in their treatment of semantic fitness as binary or graded. By placing these frameworks in dialogue, the study argues that Nyāya's formulation of yogyatā anticipates key insights of contemporary cognitive semantics and offers a logically precise model of semantic constraint. The paper further highlights the relevance of this concept for linguistic theory, cognitive modeling, and computational approaches to meaning in applied language research.
Sayali Kare (2026) studied this question.