ABSTRACT
The status of the abstractions employed in the description and analysis of linguistic form has been the subject of considerable debate. Essentially the relations between linguistic elements are of two kinds of dimensions, usually designated syntagmatic and paradigmatic. Dialect is an abstraction of the same sort of language; but as it covers fewer people, it enables one to keep one's statements closer to the actual speech of the speakers; each abstracted element in the description of a dialect covers a less wide range of actually different phenomena. So far geographically marked dialect differences have been considered, but in many language areas there are, besides these, manifest 'vertical' or social dialect divisions. The syntagmatic relations between words as lexical items have been studied under the title of collocation, and the paradigmatic relations are considered in the theories of the linguistic field. By collocation is meant the habitual association of a word in a language with other particular words in sentences.
