ABSTRACT
It is ironic that Saussure provides us with a terminology for what he himself fails to take into account. One of the founding distinctions in Saussurean linguistics is the distinction between ‘syntagmatic’ relations and ‘paradigmatic’ relations. For Saussure, it is only by the relations between words that language can sustain itself-since words have no positive substance of their own. But although he proclaims the equal importance of both types of relation, his orientation is entirely towards the paradigmatic. Compared to the new discovery of paradigmatic relations, syntagmatic relations seem very obvious and unexciting.
