Paradigms in Morphology

Studies of the structure and function of paradigms are as old as the Western grammatical tradition. The central role accorded to paradigms in traditional approaches largely re­flects the fact that paradigms exhibit systematic patterns of interdependence that facili­tate processes of analogical generalization. The recent resurgence of interest in word-based models of morphological processing and morphological structure more generally has provoked a renewed interest in paradigmatic dimensions of linguistic structure. Cur­rent methods for operationalizing paradigmatic relations and determining the behavioural correlates of these relations extend paradigmatic models beyond their traditional bound­aries. The integrated perspective that emerges from this work is one in which variation at the level of individual words is not meaningful in isolation, but rather guides the associa­tion of words to paradigmatic contexts that play a role in their interpretation.