Paradigm

paradigm

Pronounced "pah-ruh-dime." A model, example or pattern. See paradigm shift.

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paradigm

(in the philosophy of science) a very general conception of the nature of scientific endeavour within which a given enquiry is undertaken

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Paradigm 

a system of the various inflectional forms of a word. A paradigm shows the way a word’s appearance is modified according to the grammatical categories inherent in a word. A noun, for example, has inflectional forms for gender, number, and case, and a verb for person, tense, and aspect. A paradigm is a pattern of change in a word, based on grammatical categories. It is an example of a declension or conjugation.

Since a paradigm is characterized by lexical identicalness of a stem, it is frequently represented as a table of endings that are to serve as a model for the inflection of a given part of speech or for the derivation of word forms (formoobrazovanie). A description of a paradigm takes into account the number of members in the set (a paradigm is a closed series of forms), the order in which the members are arranged, the endings of each member of the paradigm, and the possible morphophonemic transformations of the stem and/or endings. Any restricted system of secondary formations with a single base is often called a paradigm; such a paradigm may be morphological, lexical, derivational, or some other type. Linguists usually use the concept of syntactic paradigm to designate a system of forms of a sentence, as in syn uchitsia (“the son is studying”), syn uchilsia (“the son studied”), and so forth.

Paradigms may be either partial (or minor), consisting of groups of forms with a certain organization, or complete (major), comprising a complement of partial paradigms. In Russian, for example, the complete paradigm of adjectives includes three singular paradigms, one plural paradigm, one paradigm of short forms, and the forms for the degrees of comparison.

E. S. KUBRIAKOVA