It has been pointed out that the mode of language is fundamentally one of sequential movement through time.
It follows from this that each word will have a linear or 'horizontal' relationship with the words that precede and succeed it, and a good deal of its capacity to 'mean' various things derives from this pattern of positioning. In the sentence 'the boy kicked the girl', the meaning 'unrolls' as each word follows its predecessor and is not complete until the final word comes into place. This constitutes language's syntagmatic aspect, and it could also be thought of as its 'diachronic' aspect because of its commitment to the passage of time.
But each word will also have relationships with other words in the language that do not occur at this point in time, but are capable of doing so. The word, that is, has 'formulaic' assocations with those other words from among which it has, so to speak, been chosen. And these other words, 'part of the inner storehouse that makes up the language of each speaker' (p. 123) - they might be synonyms, antonyms, words of similar sound or of the same grammatical function - help, by not being chosen, to define the meaning of the word which has. (Hawkes, pp. 26-7.)
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Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/See that post with different algorithms in metaboleSee the journal French Metablog with today different posts
It follows from this that each word will have a linear or 'horizontal' relationship with the words that precede and succeed it, and a good deal of its capacity to 'mean' various things derives from this pattern of positioning. In the sentence 'the boy kicked the girl', the meaning 'unrolls' as each word follows its predecessor and is not complete until the final word comes into place. This constitutes language's syntagmatic aspect, and it could also be thought of as its 'diachronic' aspect because of its commitment to the passage of time.
But each word will also have relationships with other words in the language that do not occur at this point in time, but are capable of doing so. The word, that is, has 'formulaic' assocations with those other words from among which it has, so to speak, been chosen. And these other words, 'part of the inner storehouse that makes up the language of each speaker' (p. 123) - they might be synonyms, antonyms, words of similar sound or of the same grammatical function - help, by not being chosen, to define the meaning of the word which has. (Hawkes, pp. 26-7.)
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Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/See that post with different algorithms in metaboleSee the journal French Metablog with today different posts
