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enhanced possibilities for recovering syntagmatic occurrences from the
line of writing.
An incomplete flexional paradigm (
stood for-stand for-standing for
)
can be reconstructed from mental representations guided by historically
accumulated grammatical understandings. The infinitive form,
[to] stand
for
, which becomes the entry or head term for dictionaries, has no neces-
sary special priority in the paradigm. As Saussure noted with regard to
nouns:
As far as language-users are concerned, the nominative is not in any sense the
“first” case in the declension: the forms may be thought of in any variety of
orders, depending on circumstances. (1916/1983, 124-125)
The need to reconstruct the paradigm implies that an incomplete men-
tal representation of it may have been held on the semantic (rather than
a syntactic or grammatical) level, possibly due to thinking of language
as a nomenclature, with a single or highly restricted number of senses
belonging to a word. Reconstructing the paradigm from syntagmatic
occurrences confirms the existence of the paradigm
in absentia
and the
syntagma
in praesentia
(Saussure 1916/1983, 122).
Monolingual and historical dictionaries of the English language reveal
the diversity of senses that can be gathered under the verb
to stand
as
headword. Johnson's subsequently influential approach to dictionary-
making involved being empirical and inclusive, but he also used scholastic
distinctions to inform differentiations between senses and the organiza-
tion of definitions (1755/1982).
Stand for
is distinguished as a separate
subentry within the entry for
to stand
, but neither
to represent
nor
to put
up with
are distinguished as senses (Johnson 1755/1996; see figure 8.1).
The Oxford English Dictionary
also distinguishes
stand for
as a subentry,
differentiating a greater variety of senses, including to “represent by way
of symbol or sign” (the earliest occurrence of this sense is given as 1612)
and to “put up with” (traced to 1896) (Oxford 2005). The senses of
stand
for
distinguished primarily by Johnson are assimilated to senses of
stand
,
with similar definitions and including similar illustrative quotations.
Retrieval of
stand for
and
stood for
in definitions and illustrative quota-
tion for other headwords—a form of retrieval that would have involved
considerable direct human labor for Johnson and Murray
7
or their assist-
ants (Johnson 1755/1982; Murray 1978)—reveals a further diversity
