[1] In semiotic literary criticism, a syntagm (or syntagma) is a building block of a text into which meaning is encoded by the writer and decoded by the reader, recalling past experience and placing the message in its appropriate cultural context.
The importance of relations of paradigmatic opposition is to help generate an order of dynamic complexity of experience in the past.
People have believed in binary opposition since at least classical times: e.g. in Aristotle's physics of four elements earth, air, fire and water, the relations among these are all binary oppositions that are believed to make up the world.
Paradigmatic analysis assumes that Roman Jakobson's description of the poetic system (1960, p. 358) applies to music and that in both a "projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection on to the axis of combination" occurs.
Thus paradigmatic analyses are able to base the assignment of units entirely on repetition so that "anything repeated (straight or varied) is defined as a unit, and this is true on all levels," from sections to phrases and individual sounds (Middleton, ibid).