Paradigmatic Relations

7 Key excerpts on "Paradigmatic Relations"

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  eBook - ePub

  Understanding Morphology

  • Martin Haspelmath, Andrea Sims(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8

  8.1 Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Relations in morphology

  The relations between linguistic units are of two broad kinds: syntagmatic relations between units that (potentially) follow each other in speech, and paradigmatic relations between units that (potentially) occur in the same slot. In other words, syntagmatic relations have to do with items ordered one after the other, while Paradigmatic Relations have to do with items that stand in contrast to one another. We can think about syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Relations at the sentence level, for instance, in (8.1), where the horizontal dimension shows syntagmatically related units, and the vertical dimension shows paradigmatically related units. Parentheses show optionally occurring linguistic units, curly brackets show choices among units, and asterisks show impossible units.

  Morphology can likewise be looked at from both a syntagmatic and a paradigmatic point of view. Bases are syntagmatically related to affixes that attach to them, whereas word-forms belonging to the same lexeme are paradigmatically related because they form a set of contrasting instantiations of the lexeme (to take a simple example, the English word bag is identifiable as having singular number exactly because it contrasts with the plural form bags, and because singular and plural forms generally form such a contrast in English).

  Now, in developing a description of language architecture, we might ask whether we need formal mechanisms that encode both syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions of structure. To be sure, some linguists have posited models that describe morphological patterns in purely syntagmatic terms. The formalism in (8.3) (which we have used in this book to represent the morpheme-based model; see (3.22)), represents bags as the linear combination of the morphemes bag and -s

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  eBook - ePub

  Difference

  • Mark Currie(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  in absentia, and the suggestion that these relations were the basis of meaning. And yet on the other hand, when it came to a literary text, there was a limit to the value of pointing to absent words or episodes as the basis of intelligibility, and attention was directed instead at the internal structural relations in a discourse. An account of the importance of Saussurean linguistics, for example, will almost always emphasise the profound recognition that the relationship between a signifier and a signified is arbitrary, and therefore that there is also something arbitrary about the way that differences between words determine the entities contained in the universe. The emphasis in this kind of account is on the paradigmatic meaning of difference, since it refers to the relation between a given word and those other words in the language system that delimit its meaning. But any detailed application of structuralist linguistics will usually leave this principle behind and focus on the internal relations between components of a discourse. Structuralist narratology, for example, is characteristically concerned with the syntag-matic pole of difference, and focuses on questions such as the meaning-generating function of opposition in a narrative sequence, or the temporal order and structure of narrative.

  Shortly, I will return to look at the way a structuralist analysis of narrative deploys these perspectives on difference. First I want to look at the analysis of a simple sentence in terms of its syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Relations. If I take the sentence ‘The man ran down the road’ I can easily point to the principles of combination and selection at work in its construction, using a diagram.

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  Modern Chinese Parts of Speech

  Classification Theory

  • Guo Rui(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Course of General Linguistics points out that language is a form but not an entity. It is so called because the value of a linguistic constituent is not decided by the constituent itself but by relations among constituents. There are two types of relations among linguistic constituents: syntagmatic relation and associative relation. The syntagmatic relation means that linguistic constituents combine one with another, for example, in French:

  Dieu est bon (God is kind). Re-lire (reread).

  The associative relation means that the constituents that share common things cluster into classes through association in a human’s memory. For example, the French word enseignement (education, noun) makes one associate enseigner (educate, verb) because they are cognates. Changement (change, noun, the suffix -ment is the same as -ment in enseignement), education (education, noun, synonymous). Enseignement has associative relations with these words.

  Saussure’s associative relation is not the relation in the sense of distribution; it mainly refers to a cognate relation, a similar word-formation relation, a synonymous relation and so on. To avoid the notion that the term “associative relation” may have a psychological meaning, later scholars use the term “paradigmatic relation” (see Cheng Zenghou, 1988).

  Furthermore, Chen Wangdao (1941, 1942, 1978) combined paradigmatic relation with distribution analysis: constituents make up larger combination units; the constituents located in the same grammatical positions in a combination unit form paradigmatic classes (in terms of words’ Paradigmatic Relations, a paradigmatic class is a part of speech); however, combination selects members from a paradigmatic class. That is to say, a combination unit is a sequence of parts of speech. For example:

  There are three possible scenarios of distribution in the idea that words having the same distribution form a part of speech:

  1. Single-item distribution (for the convenience of explanation, distribution here refers to the grammatical position a constituent occupies, differing from the definition of Harris). The definition of a part of speech in terms of paradigmatic relation belongs to this scenario; that is to say, words having the same function belong to the same part of speech.

  2.

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  The Semantics of Derivational Morphology

  Theory, Methods, Evidence

  • Sven Kotowski, Ingo Plag, Sven Kotowski, Ingo Plag(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Within a morphological family, some lexemes stand in a clear base-derivative relation, e.g. lover derives from love ; others stand in a determinate but indirect relation, e.g. lover and lovable are indirectly related through their shared base love. In many other cases, while the two lexemes are clearly related, the exact nature of that relation is hard if not impossible to determine; think e.g. of accidental cases such as the relation between social and society or more systematic cases such as the relation between pessimism and pessimist. Clearly then, lexemes in a family entertain a variety of Paradigmatic Relations, only some of which are base-derivative relations. The idea that Paradigmatic Relations in general play an important role in word formation has received renewed interest by some, and skepticism by others, in the last few years; witness individual papers such as Štekauer (2014) ; Bauer (2019) as well as collections such as Hathout & Namer (2018, 2019); Fernandez-Dominguez et al. (2020). The debate centers on two issues: the extent to which derivational families can be said to share properties of inflectional paradigms, and the exis tence and importance of predictability relations among members of a derivational family that cannot be reduced to their shared relationship to a common base. In this paper we focus on the latter issue, and argue that hard quantitative evidence is needed to settle it and establish whether nontrivial Paradigmatic Relations play a systematic role in word formation. To this end, we deploy on French data methods from distributional semantics to assess the semantic interpredictability between pairs of lexemes derived from a common base, and compare it to semantic predictability from the base

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  Constructions Collocations Patterns

  • Thomas Herbst, Hans-Jörg Schmid, Susen Faulhaber, Thomas Herbst, Hans-Jörg Schmid, Susen Faulhaber(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  constructions (Fillmore, Kay, and O’Connor 1988, Goldberg 1995). As already pointed out, in the EC-model, linguistic signs are considered to be highly routinized and schematized symbolic associations.

  Secondly, paradigmatic associations link linguistic associations to “competing” associations, i.e. to associations that could potentially enter the focus of attention under the given contextual and cotextual circumstances (cf. Aitchison 2003: 84–91). Routinized paradigmatic associations are the cognitive substrate of the well-known paradigmatic sense-relations (synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, etc.). They are also essential for the development of variable schemas, since the generalization process involves recognizing the fact that certain elements are interchangeable within an observed pattern. For example, in generalizing the schema THAT’S + EVALUATIVE ADJ from expressions such as that’s right , that’s nice , or that’s lovely speakers recognize both the identity of that’s and begin to associate right , nice, lovely and other adjectives as paradigmatic competitors in the variable slot of the schema.

  Thirdly, syntagmatic associations emerge in the process of production and comprehension by connecting linguistic signs and constructions which follow each other in running text. They can be fleeting associations that are activated in “one-off ” online processing situations to construct or make sense of a chain of linguistic stimuli, but, significantly, they can also be routinized and schematized as a result of repeated processing. This effect is particularly relevant in the context of this paper. If syntagmatic associations linking sequences of linguistic elements are routinized and schematized, the symbolic associations (‘meanings’) are not activated in a gradual, sequential way, with the mind incrementally blending associations related to the component parts; instead there is a direct symbolic association to the meaning of the whole unit or chunk (cf., e.g., Sinclair 1991: 110, Wray 2002: 9, Sinclair and Mauranen 2006: 37–40, Terkourafi 2011: 358–359). In more traditional terminology, this gives rise to what Burger (2010: 82–83) calls “Zeichen zweiter Stufe” (‘second-order signs’, HJS] which are composed of signs that are themselves first-order signs, resulting in the existence of a “sekundäres semiotisches System” [‘secondary semiotic system’, HJS].142

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  Grammatical Relations

  The Evidence Against Their Necessity and Universality

  • D. N. S. Bhat(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3.5 ). English shows an entirely different situation in this regard, as it uses the same set of controllers in both these types of processes. Since this set cannot be identified either with the set of semantic relations or of pragmatic relations, there is clearly a need to postulate a third set called ‘grammatical relations’ (like subject and direct object) in order to describe these processes in an explicit and economical fashion in that language.

  2.3 EXCLUDING PRAGMATIC FACTORS

  I have argued in the previous section that the grammatical relations are only of grammatical relevance even in the case of languages in which they have been considered to be necessary for providing an adequate description (see also Andrews 1985:97). They would not be necessary in the case of all languages. The question as to whether a given language would require them or not for its description can therefore be answered only on the basis of a careful study of the ways in which the language represents the various semantic and pragmatic relations and constrains (or controls) the various morphological and syntactic processes that are connected with those relations.

  I wish to examine, in this connection, the failure of some of the contemporary theorists to give proper importance to these particular aspects of language in their study of related topics. My claim is that the disputes that have arisen in the case of these topics have resulted directly from such a failure.

  2.3.1 Configurationality

  Consider, for example, the dispute concerning the distinction between the so-called ‘configurational’ and ‘non-configurational’ languages in the contemporary generative approaches to language. It has been claimed that the familiar languages like English are configurational in the sense that their sentence structure can be expressed in configurational terms, i.e. in terms of precedence and dominance. For example, the structure of a sentence like John ate the fruit can be described with the help of a treestructure (as in the diagram on p.

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  eBook - ePub

  Syntax

  A Linguistic Introduction to Sentence Structure

  • Keith Brown, Jim Miller(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  stupid. These two sets of words make up two form classes, or paradigms, and the words are said to be paradigmatically related. Paradigmatic Relations are not displayed in constituent structure diagrams but are captured in a far more indirect fashion in dictionaries, where the entry for each word specifies which paradigm or form class the word belongs to.

  The other major relationship among constituents is called syntagmatic.1 ‘Syntagmatic’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘placed together’ – and indeed is related to ‘syntax’, which derives from the Greek noun meaning ‘placing together’. We have already seen in the first chapters that constituents are not placed together or combined randomly but that there are constraints on what types of constituent can combine and in what order they occur. For example, in English, determiners combine with nouns and not with verbs, and they precede the noun. We are about to discover that syntagmatic relations are more complex, and that there is more to them than just linear order.

  The central idea in the following paragraphs is that any phrase contains a special constituent called the head, which is the central, characteristic and obligatory constituent (see pages 99 –111 , 260). For example, a sequence of words qualifies as an adjective phrase only if it contains an adjective; very does not constitute an adjective phrase but very stupid does. The adjective is the characteristic constituent in an adjective phrase. It is also central, in that it controls whether an intensifier can occur; adjectives such as wooden and stone exclude intensifiers such as very, amazingly and rather – assuming that, for example, wooden

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