Two axes of word relationships

Let's start with a warmer...

Which of these tasks or exercises do you normally see in coursebooks?

1. Look at the highlighted verbs in the text and match them with the following synonyms: investigate, find, catch, escape
2. Match the adjectives with their opposites, e.g. tall / short
3. Underline in the text all the expressions with OF
4. Group the words according to categories, e.g. vehicles: car, motorcycle; musical instruments: guitar, piano etc
5. Underline all the adverbs in the text. Now underline the verbs they go with.
6. Rick says "the journey was long and tiring". What other adjectives can be used to describe journeys?
7. Which is the odd word out? gaze - smile - stare - look

You probably answered 1, 2, 4 and 7 and to a lesser extent 3, 5 and 6 

Now read on to find out why...

Words in a language can be described in terms of two types of relationships: paradigmatic and syntagmatic. A paradigmatic relationship refers to the relationship between words that are the same parts of speech and which can be substituted for each other in the same position within a given sentence. A syntagmatic relationship refers to the relationship a word has with other words that surround it. In the table below, paradigmatic relationships are shown vertically and syntagmatic relationship - horizontally:

	acquired
	purchased		costly		bicycle
	got		pricey	old	motorcycle
John	bought	a(n)	expensive	new	car

Click on the tab in the bottom right-hand corner to view in full screen

As you can see, the substitution of one word for another will not affect the syntax of the sentence. 

Paradigmatic (vertical) axis

The words car, motorcycle and bicycle are related to each other because they all belong to the same semantic group: vehicles - a relationship known as hyponymy with a vehicle as a hypernym (a more general or superordinate word) and car, motorcycle and bike as hyponyms (more specific words, in this case types of vehicles). The other two kinds of paradigmatic relationship are those of synonymy (buy = purchase) and antonymy (new / old).

Seen like this, it may seem that any word in a language can be substituted for another. But as Corpus linguistics and Second Language Acquisition research have shown, language doesn't work in this slot-and-filler fashion and is not stored in the mental lexicon as a giant substitution table. Linear relationships with other words are equally important.

Syntagmatic (horizontal) axis
Unlike the paradigmatic relationships, the syntagmatic relationships of a word are not about meaning. They are about the lexical company the word keeps (collocation) and grammatical patterns in which it occurs (colligation).

Let's look again at the table / graph above where expensive can be substituted for pricey:

expensive new car

 pricey    new   car

It seems to work, but you're unlikely to say "costly new car". Also old cannot be easily replaced by new as the combination expensive old is less likely than expensive new. In any case, the opposite of new in this case would probably be used or second-hand and not necessarily old. All these are collocational patterns. But there are also colligational preferences. For example, the words take in and deceive are in a paradigmatic relationship with each other, i.e. they are synonyms. However, take in has a tendency to occur in the passive:

He was taken in by her sob story
rather than "Her sob story took him in"

whereas deceive doesn't show such grammatical preference.

Wolter and Gylstad (2011), who studied the production of English collocations in L1 Swedish speakers of English, make an interesting observation that paradigmatic relationships tend to be similar across - even vastly different - languages whereas syntagmatic relationships are often arbitrary. For example, in English one goes on a diet, in Greek one “does diet” /'ka;neiß di;aita/, in French one “puts oneself on a diet” /sǝ metR o ReƷim/ and in Russian one “sits on a diet” /sest’ na di;'aitu/.

Therefore in ELT whereas students (and teachers) may derive great pleasure from such activities as putting words in categories (animals: dog, cat, turtle; transport: car, bus, bike) they would probably get more linguistic benefit if they - to put it simply - focused on drive a car and ride a bike, i.e horizontal / syntagmatic relationships.

John Sinclair (2004), the pioneer of corpus linguistics, contends:

the tradition of linguistic theory has been massively

biased in favour of the paradigmatic rather than the

syntagmatic dimension. (p. 140)

I believe, just like in linguistics, the paradigmatic dimension has been overemphasised in the ELT methodology. As you have seen from the warmer, vocabulary teaching in textbooks tends to focus mainly on paradigmatic relationships, e.g matching synonyms and antonyms, grouping words according to sets. However, collocations have also made their way into the mainstream teaching materials in the past 10 or so years.

I have provided some ideas (examples 3, 5 and 6 in the warmer) for focusing on syntagmatic relationships between words. Can you think of other activities and tasks that would highlight the syntagmatic dimension of vocabulary learning? Your ideas are welcome in the comments below.


References

Sinclair, J. M. (2004). Trust the text: Language, corpus and discourse. London and New York: Routledge.

Wolter, B. & Gyllstad, H. (2011). Collocational links in the L2 mental lexicon and the influence of L1 intralexical knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 32(4), 430-449