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Concept
Paradigmatic analysis
Summary
Paradigmatic analysis is the analysis of paradigms embedded in the text rather than of the surface structure (syntax) of the text which is termed syntagmatic analysis. Paradigmatic analysis often uses commutation tests, i.e. analysis by substituting words of the same type or class to calibrate shifts in connotation.
In semiotic literary criticism, a syntagm (or syntagma) is a building block of a text into which meaning is encoded by the writer and decoded by the reader, recalling past experience and placing the message in its appropriate cultural context. Individual syntagms can be arranged together to form more complex syntagms: groups of sounds (and the letters to represent them) form words, groups of words form sentences, sentences form narratives, and so on. A list of syntagms of the same type is called a paradigm. So, in English, the alphabet is the paradigm from which the syntagms of words are formed. The set of words collected together in a lexicon becomes the paradigm from which sentences etc. are formed. Hence, paradigmatic analysis is a method for exploring a syntagm by identifying its constituent paradigm, studying the individual paradigmatic elements, and then reconstructing the process by which the syntagm takes on meaning.
The importance of paradigmatic relationships and paradigmatic analysis includes contrasting and comparing each of the meanings present in each text in which similar circumstances will be chosen. This helps to define value in the text. The importance of relations of paradigmatic opposition is to help generate an order of dynamic complexity of experience in the past. People have believed in binary opposition since at least classical times: e.g. in Aristotle's physics of four elements earth, air, fire and water, the relations among these are all binary oppositions that are believed to make up the world.
Roman Jakobson's model on the functions of language has two levels of description:
the various component elements forming language, and
what humans do with the language when they use it.
Official source
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