Anandavardhana, working in ninth-century Kashmir, made a claim that once seen cannot be unseen: the meaning a crafted utterance actually delivers is not what it says but what it makes resonate. Abhidha - denotation - is the scaffolding. Vyanjana - suggestion, resonance, the layer that reverberates after the literal meaning has passed - is the substance. His Dhvanyaloka elevated this third layer from accidental ornament to the structural centre of aesthetic theory.
The consequence for anyone working on communication is sharp. The level of meaning that actually shapes the receiver’s experience is typically the level the brief, the spec, and the QA rubric do not address. The words denote. The resonance lands.
Where English Falls Short
Grice’s implicature is the nearest Western concept. It treats suggested meaning as derived from a cooperative principle layered on top of the literal - the literal is primary, the implicature is inferred from context and from apparent violations of conversational maxims. The dhvani framework inverts the hierarchy. In a crafted utterance, the resonant meaning is the aesthetic object; the denotation is its scaffolding. The question is not what the utterance implies but what it makes happen in the receiver.
The orientations differ in exactly the way that matters for practical work. Gricean implicature is a theory of how hearers recover unspoken meaning from conversation. Dhvani is a theory of how artists construct the conditions for specific resonances to arise. For UX writing, prompt design, brand voice, and AI tone, the second orientation is the operational one - because it starts where the actual design decision lives.
Where it Shows Up
UX copy. “Delete this file?” denotes a question. One phrasing resonates trust - the system assumes the user knows what they are doing. Another resonates suspicion - “are you sure? are you really sure?” The denotation is identical. The resonance is the experience. Dhvani names exactly what is being decided when the copy gets written.
Prompt design. “Think step by step” does most of its work at the resonance layer. The instructional content is small. The lever is the register it invokes - the cognitive posture it summons in the model.
Onboarding flows. What an onboarding flow suggests about the user’s competence does more work than what it instructs. Users carry the resonance long after they have forgotten the steps.
Brand voice. Brand does not live at the denotation layer. A brand audit that examines only what copy says, without attending to what it resonates, has not yet looked at the thing it was hired to audit.
AI assistant tone. The difference between an assistant that resonates “I am here” and one that resonates “I am performing helpfulness” lives entirely at the dhvani layer. Users feel the distinction effortlessly. Product teams that lack the concept cannot locate the problem.
IKS Roots
The Sanskrit term is dhvani (ध्वनि), literally “sound” or “reverberation,” used technically for meaning that arrives by suggestion rather than by statement. The Indian tradition distinguishes three layers of meaning: abhidha (denotation, the primary semantic function), lakshana (indirect or secondary meaning - see G3), and vyanjana (suggestion). Dhvani is the name for the aesthetic effect that vyanjana produces in a constituted receiver. Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka (9th century) gave the doctrine its foundational form; Abhinavagupta’s commentary, the Locana, gave it mature theoretical depth. The school had to argue its case against rival positions - from Bhatta Nayaka and the Mimamsakas particularly - which is why the technical apparatus is detailed and the defense thorough.
See also A2 (rasa - the aesthetic effect that dhvani produces in the qualified receiver) and A4 (sahridaya - the qualified receiver whose constitution determines whether the resonance lands).
Further Reading
The Ingalls, Masson, Patwardhan translation of the Dhvanyaloka in the Harvard Oriental Series. K. Krishnamoorthy’s introduction for an accessible entry. Sheldon Pollock’s Rasa Reader gives the broader theoretical context across the Indian aesthetic tradition.