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A syntagma is
any word or phrase which forms a syntactic unit. A syntagmatic association is
any in which the response to a stimulus is a word that can syntactically follow
in a sentence or a phrase.
Every item
of language has a paradigmatic relationship with every other item which can be
substituted for it (such as apple with peach), and a syntagmatic relationship
with items which occur within the same construction (He ate the peach). (So,
for example, row items in a combined list are associated syntagmatically, that
is through the structure of the matrix; column items, on the other hand are
associated paradigmatically, and bear a categorical relationship to the column
label and consequently to each other.)
The terms
paradigmatic and syntagmatic were used by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to
indicate two axes for the understanding of language. The syntagmatic axis is
controlled by the way units in any given language are combined sequentially.
The paradigmatic axis, by contrast, is sometimes called the
‘associative’ axis. It refers to the network of associations
connected to the actual word selected, that is, words which belong to the same
class or category. |
