Paradigmatic / Syntagmatic relations

“[Ferdinand de Saussure] emphasized that meaning arises from the differences between signifiers; these differences are of two kinds: syntagmatic (concerning positioning) and paradigmatic (concerning substitution). The syntagm is understood as the linear sequence of oral and written language. Saussure called the latter associative relations (Saussure, 1983, 121; Saussure, 1974, 122) but Roman Jakobson's term is now used. The distinction is a key one in structuralist semiotic analysis. These two dimensions are often presented as 'axes', where the horizontal axis is the syntagmatic and the vertical axis is the paradigmatic. The plane of the syntagm is that of the combination of 'this-and-this-and-this' (as in the sentence, 'the man cried') whilst the plane of the paradigm is that of the selection of 'this-or-this-or-this' (e.g. the replacement of the last word in the same sentence with 'died' or 'sang').” (Chandler, 2002).

Example:

Green (1995a) found that effective use of syntagmatic relationships in index languages has suffered from inaccurate or incomplete characterization in both linguistics and information science. A number of ''myths'' about syntagmatic relationships are debunked: the exclusivity of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships, linearity as a defining characteristic of syntagmatic relationships, the restriction of syntagmatic relationships to surface linguistic units, the limitation of syntagmatic relationship benefits in document retrieval to precision, and the general irrelevance of syntagmatic relationships for document retrieval. None of the mechanisms currently used with index languages is powerful enough to achieve the levels of precision and recall that the expression of conceptual syntagmatic relationships is in theory capable of. New designs for expressing these relationships in index languages will need to take into account such characteristics as their semantic nature, systematicity, generalizability, and constituent nature.

Literature:

Broughton, Vanda (2007). Meccano, molecules, and the organization of knowledge. The continuing contribution of S. R. Ranganathan.  Second KOKO (KOnnecting KOmmunities) event held by ISKO UK on 5th November entitled Ranganathan Revisited: Facets for the future.  http://www.iskouk.org/presentations/vanda_broughton.pdf

Chandler, D. (1994): Semiotics for Beginners. (Chapter 4: Paradigms and Syntagms). [WWW document]. http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/   [January 15, 2004]

Green, R. (1995a). Syntagmatic relationships in indexing languages: A reassessment. Library Quarterly, 65(4), 365-385.

Green, R. (1995b). The expression of conceptual syntagmatic relationships: A 
comparative survey. Journal of Documentation, 51(4), 315-338. 

Green, R. (1995c). Topical relevance relationships 1: Why topic matching fails. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 46(9), 646-653.

Saussure, Ferdinand de ([1916] 1974): Course in General Linguistics (translated by Wade Baskin). London: Fontana/Collins.

Saussure, Ferdinand de ([1916] 1983): Course in General Linguistics (translated by Roy Harris). London: Duckworth.

Warner, J. (2007).   Analogies Between Linguistics and Information Theory. Journal of the American Journal of Information Science & Technology, 58(3), 309–321.

See also: Natural Language Processing; Syntactical devises

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 19-11-2007

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