Identifying Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Hallmark of Language in ‘The Open Window’ by Munro-Saki

Abstract

The structure of literary language is refined and well woven as there is a deep connection between language and literature. This paper attempts to investigate the choices and chain relationship between paradigms and syntagms in the structure of this story. Saussure’s (1916) paradigmatic and syntagmatic relation among signs has been used as a framework. The study is essentially qualitative and data has been collected by using purposive sampling technique from the short story ‘The Open Window’ by Munro-Saki. The findings of this study show the simple to complex linear grammatical relation among signs, presence of reported and reporting speech, independent and dependent clauses, verb, adjectives and adverbs that are used with title to highlight its central role and significance in the text. Besides, it also notifies the embedded structure of language as the reordering of syntagms in relation to grammar represents the writer’s intention to convey important information at first hand. Furthermore, there is paradigmatic relation at all grammatical, semantic, phonological and lexical level. Moreover, Munro-Saki choice of words show the semantic rich and context-based vocabulary that evokes different sorts of images in the story as there is clear stances of moving from gothic to anti-gothic, psychological to real and from fictional to natural world. Consequently, it is explored that the structure of literary language, the position and substitution relations are perfectly used by author that contributes a lot to make the narrative meaningful and interlink at all levels of language and literature. In short, this research will help the future researchers and instructors to understand literal structure of language and bilateral aspect of signs efficiently.