69249454-chandler-semiotics

ANALYSING STRUCTURES 87
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a topic to which we will return. Although we will discuss paradigmatic
and syntagmatic relations separately, it should be emphasized
that the semiotic analysis of a text or corpus has to tackle the system
as a whole, and that the two dimensions cannot be considered in isolation.
The description of any semiotic system involves specifying
both the membership of all of the relevant paradigmatic sets and also
the possible combinations of one set with another in well-formed syntagms.
For the analyst, according to Saussure (who was, of course,
focusing on the language system as a whole), ‘the system as a united
whole is the starting point, from which it becomes possible, by a
process of analysis, to identify its constituent elements’; one cannot
try to construct the system by working upwards from the constituent
elements (Saussure 1983, 112). However, Roland Barthes argued that
‘an important part of the semiological undertaking’ was to divide
texts ‘into minimal significant units . . . then to group these units into
paradigmatic classes, and finally to classify the syntagmatic relations
which link these units’ (Barthes 1967a, 48; cf. Leymore 1975, 21 and
Lévi-Strauss 1972, 211). In practice, the analyst is likely to need to
move back and forth between these two approaches as the analysis
proceeds.
THE PARADIGMATIC DIMENSION
Whereas syntagmatic analysis studies the ‘surface structure’ of a
text, paradigmatic analysis seeks to identify the various paradigms
(or pre-existing sets of signifiers) which underlie the manifest content
of texts. This aspect of structural analysis involves a consideration
of the positive or negative connotations of each signifier (revealed
through the use of one signifier rather than another), and the existence
of ‘underlying’ thematic paradigms (e.g. binary oppositions
such as public–private).
Semioticians often focus on the issue of why a particular signifier
rather than a workable alternative was used in a specific context:
on what they often refer to as ‘absences’. Saussure noted that a characteristic
of what he called ‘associative’ relations – what would now
be called paradigmatic relations – was that (in contrast to syntagmatic
relations) such relations held ‘in absentia’ – in the absence