Syntagmatic Vs Paradigmatic Analysis
Structuralist semioticians ask for simple constituent segments within every text , which is termed syntagms. The syntagmatic analysis of a text involves studying its structure and the relationships between each of the syntagms of a text. In visual arts like film and television, the standard levels of syntagmatic analysis would naturally involve an analysis of how each frame, shot, scene or sequence are related to the others. It all starts in the lowest level as the individual frame. Since films are projected at a rate of 24 frames a second, the viewer is never conscious of individual frames, but significant frames can be isolated by the analyst for meticulous analysis. At the next level up is the shot, or a 'single take ' - an unedited sequence of frames which may or may not include camera movement. A shot is embodied or terminated by a cut or other transitions. And in the next upper level is the scene which consists of more than one shot set in a single place and time. A sequence spans more than one place and or/time but it is a logical or thematic sequence or continuum having some kind of ‘dramatic unity '. The linguistic model often leads semioticians to a search for units of analysis in audio-visual media which are analogous to those used in linguistics. In the semiotics of film, crude equivalents with written language are sometimes postulated especially because semiotics was originally meant to analyze the written language.