Meaningful Arrangement - Exploring the Syntactic Description of Texts - Edward McDonald
16 Modelling syntactic patterning (i): syntagmatic approaches
Meaningful Arrangement - Exploring the Syntactic Description of Texts - Edward McDonald
Edward McDonald [+]
University of Auckland.
Description
Now that syntax is established as an independent field of study, there are two major theoretical decisions to be made: firstly, how to theorise syntactic relations, including the relationship between syntactic categories and semantic ones; and secondly, how to model syntactic patterning.In Chapters 16 and 17, the author considers the second of these themes, how to model syntactic patterning. Here he picks up on one of Saussure’s key distinctions, that between the ‘horizontal’ syntagmatic aspect and the ‘vertical’ paradigmatic aspect of language (see Chapter 3), and show how it can be used to characterise the emphases and biases of different theories. While it is sometimes assumed that ‘syntax’ is necessarily ‘syntagmatic’ (both deriving from the same Greek root meaning ‘joint arrangement’) – something that is certainly true of mainstream approaches to the subject – there are signifi cant minority traditions which instead take the paradigmatic as their starting point. Here again, as in the case of ‘formalist’ and ‘functionalist’, there is no necessarily clean break between the two, with most paradigmatic approaches dealing also with the syntagmatic, and many basically syntagmatic approaches also incorporating aspects of the paradigmatic.