Syntagmatic Processes

Traditionally, syntagmatic processes refer to the influence of “horizontal” elements on a word or phrase, in contradistinction to paradigmatic processes, which refer to “vertical” or alternative substitutions in a phrase. The term had significant currency in early and mid-twentieth century linguistics from Saussure on, and helped to define the formal study of syntax as widely practiced today. The phrase was, however, not widely adopted in the generative linguistics tradition; this is perhaps largely because classical paradigmatic variation was co-opted to provide supporting evidence for a general notion of syntactic structure in the form of complementary distribution in a syntagmatic or syntactic construction. Hence, some of the more interesting aspects of paradigmatic processes, as studied by structuralists and traditional linguists, were ignored, since they did not lend support to the developing view of linguistics as syntax. Hence, with the emergence of a purely formal syntax there was no further need to refer to syntagmatic processes by themselves. For Hjelmslev (1943), there are two possible types of relations that exist between elements in a syntagmatic process (e.g., words in a phrase): interdependence and determination; an interdependence between terms in a process was referred to as “solidarity” between the constituents; alternatively, when one element unilaterally determined another one, the relation was termed selection by that element. It is this latter sense which is related to the notion of selectional restrictions as developed by Chomsky (1965), as noted by Cruse (1986). In the present discussion, syntagmatic processes will refer primarily to the “determination of selection” as construed in contemporary linguistic frameworks.