A Structuralist Interlude

April 24, 2009 at 1:06 pm (Language as Medium) (Bob Perelman, Language Writing, Ron Silliman, Structuralist Linguistics)

In the previous post I used the terms paradigmatic and syntagmatic from Saussure without really explaining what I meant by them or how contextually they apply to what I was talking about with respect to Silliman’s “The New Sentence” essay. So here I will try to explain how I understand Saussure’s terms and how they apply to this break in Language Writing that I am trying to articulate.

Saussure’s linguistic model posits two axis of linguistic relations: paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations between words. Syntagmatic relationships between words are the relationships between words placed in a specific temporal or spatial order and constitute the syllogistic relationships of grammar and syntax. Thus by placing words in a spatial relationship a certain kind of connection arises between the words that allows for a larger unit integration of meaning. For instance placing the word “open” next to the word “door” we get the construction “open door” which describes a certain state of existence (open) of a particular object (the door). However, if we slightly change this order by adding a word between the two already here we get “open the door” which becomes a very different kind of construction (a command with an implied subject) and changes the fundamental nature of the word open in this context. The word “open”‘s meaning is contextually driven by the words in spatial relationship around it; this contextual meaning is a syntagmatic one, and the relationships between the words in either phrase are syntagmatic relations-in other words syntax.

The other axis of Saussure’s linguistic relationships is that of paradigm. The paradigmatic axis is an associative one, in factthat is what Saussure first calls it: “Associative Relations” (122ff). The relationships between the words are poetic and logical rather than temporal or spatial. It is about word choice rather than word order. The use of one particular word like “scarlet” over another particular word like “crimson” for instance is an exploration along paradigmatic axis. Similarly, the relationship between the words “swordfish” and “broadsword” is also along the paradigmatic axis in that the two words share a common root and are then quite easily associatively related.  This axis will become more important in later posts when I start talking about language writing which plays at the level of the word or the small linguistic unit.

Another way of thinking about these two types of relationships is that syntagmatic relationships are the relationships that allow for larger units of meaning to be constructed out of single words, and that paradigmatic relationships are the non-syntactic, associative relationships within our vocabularies and lexicons that inform our use and interpretation of particular words.

So far this has all been pretty standard structuralist linguistics. However, one of the things that Silliman points out is that the rules for grammar and syntax only extend so far as the sentence, and as such the syntagmatic only really refers to the accrual of meaning up to and to the point of the sentence-then something else takes over, this paragraph language integration which allows for higher order content. The syntagmatic relationships between words get re-set by the full stop. Meaning, however, does not. What Silliman is positing with the new sentence is an investigation of this fact. What happens when you only work with syntagms and functionally inhibit endophora? “So meanings appear only as acts of will.” or in other words, the integration of language into “meaning” structures larger than the sentence level is done purely through the intervention of the reader (Perelman 6). The sentence as a metrical unit of composition rather than as a logical unit of composition suggests the possibility of a radically different kind of linguistic integration-one based on poetic, connotative values rather than denotative, logical ones. Again, Perelman recognizes this with his enigmatic “This all connotes.” in the seventh (“words”) section of a.k.a. (52). The language integration of paragraphs of new sentences work along associative paths rather than along intentional, logical ones simply because the markers for that logical structure are not there:

There are two types of story: something happens, or it doesn’t have to. To register a change of state, water freezes, explorers bob on isolate floes. Taste deranges its choices. Perceptibility walks in backwards, disappears into the chair. At the end of the tale, the robot turns out to be made of flesh and blood.

(Perelman 36)

In this paragraph the logical links between the sentences are somewhere between tenuous and completely conjectural, yet the five sentences cohere as a unit and all add something to an overall gestalt of meaning. The integration occurs through the work done by the reader piecing the text together into a kind of “story” where “something happens, or it doesn’t have to.” Maybe this is all obvious, but one of the things that I find fascinating here is that by limiting the paragraph to the purely syntagmatic, the larger unit linguistic integration begins to resemble the paradigmatic. I might also add that Silliman’s “new sentence” is not really a new sentence, but a newly articulated idea about how sentences work together to form large semantic/linguistic/meaning structures.

Perelman, Bob. a.k.a.. Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1984.

de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguisitics. trans.  Wade Baskin. New York, Toronto, and London: McGraw Hill, 1966.