Definition of "syntagmatic" []

• Of or relating to the relationship between linguistic units in a construction or sequence, as between the (n) and adjacent sounds in not, ant, and ton. The identity of a linguistic unit within a language is described by a combination of its syntagmatic and its paradigmatic relations. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Exteriorizing thought, the sonnet de-psychologizes it, materializes it, alienates it from the thinker as subject by placing any given sonnet about the beloved other in a syntagmatic relation to all other thoughts about other beloved others."
• "He'd already booted up and was stealing a quick glance at Maestra's e-mail, as if overnight it might have undergone a syntagmatic rearrangement, or he, after a night's rest, might find in it a nugget of information that had escaped his earlier scrutiny."
• "Instead of inferring the structure of mind in general from the structure of its large-scale causal consequences (language, cultural artifacts, and so on), what it suggests is that we might infer the structure of particular minds, i.e., personalities, from their immediate causal consequences, the syntagmatic spoken chain that makes up the speech of each indi - vidual person."