Sunday 11 February 2018

What Fawcett Understands By 'Paradigmatic Relations'

Fawcett (2010: 42):
Paradigmatic relations are relations of contrast. There are two key points that must be made about them. Firstly, paradigmatic relations are unlike syntagmatic relations in that they exist only in the potential and never in an instance.  From the viewpoint of the text analyst, they express a contrast between (1) the meaning (and so the form) that was chosen for use in the text and (2) the one or more meanings (and so forms) that might have been chosen (but were not). In other words, paradigmatic relations exist only in the language that is used to produce a text-sentence — and not in the sentence itself.

Blogger Comments:

This continues Fawcett's confusion of the realisation relation between the paradigmatic axis (system) and the syntagmatic axis (structure) with the instantiation relation between potential and instance.  As previously explained, in Fawcett's model, schematised as Figure 4, paradigmatic system is equated with (meaning level) potential, and syntagmatic structure is equated with (form level) instance.

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