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ries marked by spaces. By contrast, oral speech does not necessarily have
intervals of silence (analogous to spaces in writing) between words, and
it does not constitute a product that can be segmented, with the cut seg-
ments retaining material existence. Oral speech has no direct equivalent
to the surface on which words can be distributed. Cutting the line of writ-
ing implies a disruption of linearity; the cut pieces can be gathered on a
preexisting surface. Identical cut words from different syntagmas, possi-
bly contrasting in meaning from their original syntagmas, can be regarded
as the origin for the concept of the paradigm, particularly in the sense of a
network of associations. Therefore, the paradigm can be regarded as pro-
duced by and abstracted from the experience of the syntagma.
The cut words can be distributed on a surface in ways that materi-
ally embody each of the triple senses of the paradigm. First, in the least
deliberately imposed organization, cut pieces can be allowed to fall onto
a surface as they are cut from above, similar to the material experience
of cutting paper with scissors above a desk surface. Cutting along the
vertical axis and allowing words to fall onto a surface corresponds to the
first sense of paradigm as the vertical axis, counterposed to the horizon-
tal syntagma, with a spatial rather than an immediately temporal exten-
sion in real material form. The technology of premodernity—paper and
scissors—requires human material and syntactic labor. Under modernity,
it could be conducted computationally, but the result would yield limited
semantic interest.
With greater imposed organization, cut words could be grouped by sim-
ilarity in patterns (for instance, by opening sequences of letters of words),
resulting in pattern-based organization, where distinguished groups of
words might constitute collections of grammatical variants (for instance,
cheva
l
, cheva
ux)
. Such organization captures one aspect of the second
sense of paradigm—the collection of units or members of an associative
group that can be substituted for one another in the syntagma and still
remain syntactically or semantically acceptable or cognate. This captures
only that aspect of the associative sense of the paradigm that corresponds
to similarity in patterns, not the semantic or even grammatical relations
between elements dissimilar in pattern (consider
is
,
are
). Organization by
pattern also captures the paradigm's material basis, considered as derived
