What paradigms and what for?

Abstract

The paradigmatic character of the interword relationships has been present from the very beginnings of morphology as a branch of linguistics. The models of ancient Greek and Latin, to take a classic example, “[...] project morphological analysis primarily upwards from the word, and treat the association of words with paradigms or other sets of forms as the most fundamental morphological task” (Blevins, 2013, p. 375). As was the received wisdom in these ancient grammatical traditions, paradigmatic relations were mostly identified among word forms or what we would call today morphosyntactic words. The paradigm case of a paradigm was the set of forms in which a word could appear. It goes without saying that morphology was understood as the study of syntactically conditioned and appropriate forms.