Dangerous liaisons

Abstract

Paradigms we live byParadigms are strictly associated with languages.Since their early childhood, speakers of the most disparate languages of the world are exposed to more or less complex versions of the question: What is the paradigm of the word X?A simpler version of this question is found in languages which are relatively poor of morphology like English and it reads: What is the plural form of the words chicken and ox?, where the answer is of course chickens and oxen.Slightly generalizing the question in wider terms, we can rephrase it as: What is the word for expressing the plural of chicken or a person who paints?The obvious answers chickens and painter imply that the original question has been remolded in accordance with the onomasiological dimension, i.e., the speakers' implicit illocutionary intention of using a formal way to refer to a certain relevant mental or cognitive content (cf.Štekauer 2005; Geeraerts 2010: 23).The questions and the corresponding answers naturally arise from the speakers' pronounced cognitive ability to make associative relations among words.As already envisaged by Saussure's "rapports associatifs" (1916: 176), this ability is essentially of an analogical nature and results from the sheer exposure to bunches of pairs of related words like bird/birds, ship/ships, tree/trees, etc. on the inflectional side, and lead/leader, sing/singer, write/writer, etc. on the derivational one.Saussure (1916: 181) was well aware of the fact that associative relations based on morphological relatedness pose a strong limit to his principle of arbitrariness insofar as they introduce a "motivation relative".In his mind, on a par with arbitrariness, a principle of motivation should be assumed serving as its conceptual counterpart because "[i]l n'existe pas de langue où rien ne soit motivé ; quant à en concevoir une où tout le serait, cela serait impossible par définition" (1916: 183) ["There is no language in which nothing is motivated, and our definition makes it impossible to conceive of a language in which everything is motivated" (ET: 133)].It has to be added that we normally find a much more restricted number of theoretically

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