Lexical meaning - Syntagmatic relations (ePub)

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Bonn, language: English, abstract: Ferdinand de Saussure called the relationship between a word and other accompanying words a syntagmatic relation, and the relationship between a word and related but not-occurring words, an associative relationship. For the latter a new term was somewhat later proposed by Hjelmslev - a paradigmatic relation-ship, which is universally preferred in modern linguistics.
Paradigmatic (vertical) relations are those that bind the elements of a group or a class of lexemes - "sets of intersubstitutable elements" (Lyons 2002:96) - from paradigm of a single world to whole lexical fields. Lexical items so related stand in opposition or contrast to each other and help to define the meaning of each other.
Syntagmatic (horizontal) relations between words are "the relations that hold among elements that can occur in combination with one another, in well-formed syntagms". (Lyons 2002:96) They are linear and simultaneous in the stream of speech or writing and define the rules of combining smaller units of any level of a language into bigger ones and compatibility of the former. They characterise the formation of syntagms as a language sequence.
I have chosen to make syntagmatic relations between words the topic of this work because in my opinion this relationship is the most important part of linguistics as it is namely syntagmatics that describes and explains the functioning of words in speech and writing, i.e. in the reality of a language. It is certainly one of the most important aspects of each language as far as its learners are concerned as it is vital for those who learn a language to learn how the words collocate with each other alongside their meanings and paradigms.