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The paradigm has been understood classically in a triple sense:
r
as the vertical axis, counterposed to the horizontal syntagma—a spa-
tial rather than immediately temporal extension;
r
as the collection of units or members of an associative group that can
be substituted for one another in the syntagma, while remaining syntacti-
cally or semantically acceptable or cognate; and
r
possibly most influentially, as the network of associations a word
can acquire when considered apart from the syntagma, in accord with
Saussure's primary understanding.
Outside the context of discourse, words having something in common are associ-
ated together in the memory. (Saussure 1916/1983, 121)
The idea of memory as a network of associations entered modern cog-
nitive science through the idea of the semantic network, without any
discernible indebtedness to Saussure but possibly prompted by similar
influences from language. The originally complex semantic networks gen-
erally have reduced to simpler and more computationally tractable tree
structures that incorporate genus: species relations (Johnson-Laird 1988,
328-330).
Syntagmatic relations hold
in praesentia
; in contrast, associative rela-
tions obtain
in absentia
when the line of writing is considered alone. The
syntagma immediately introduces the idea of a fixed sequence that con-
tains a specific number of elements. An associative group lacks a fixed
order and may have an indefinite number of elements. Some associative
forms, such as the flexional paradigm of the cases of a noun or verb, may
have a limited but not necessarily precisely agreed upon number of ele-
ments (Saussure 1916/1983, 122-124).
Representation of the paradigm on surface—as a diagram, rather than
simply as line—is often essential for exposition; representations impose
both pattern-based and semantic cohesion (Saussure 1916/1983, 125).
Both the possibility of distributing cut pieces on a surface and the estab-
lished form of representing the paradigm as a diagram on a plane imply
that linearity alone is not sufficient to represent the paradigm in an imme-
diately intelligible way.
The paradigm has been regarded as formed by units carved from the
syntagma (Barthes 1984, 121). The metaphorical force of
carving out
