Paradigmatic pattern analysis

Abstract The phrase Sprache ist der Schlüssel zur Integration (“language is the key to integration”) is found frequently in the discourse around immigration in the German-speaking countries. Based on a corpus-linguistic analysis of this phrase, this paper proposes the existence of a particular type of constructional idiom I refer to as ‘paradigmatic pattern’. Like a metaphorical pattern (in the sense of Metaphorical Pattern Analysis), a paradigmatic pattern establishes a correspondence between a word occurring in a particular slot of the idiom and another word more typical of that slot, contributing to a conceptual mapping between the domains instantiated by these words. Unlike in the case of metaphorical patterns, the domain evoked by the paradigmatic pattern is not the domain in which the pattern occurs in its literal meaning, but a domain evoked by a highly frequent collexeme in one of the slots. As in the case of metaphorical patterns, however, this collexeme contributes (aspects of) its meaning even when it is replaced by another word. I suggest a generalized version of Metaphorical Pattern Analysis, referred to as Paradigmatic Pattern Analysis, to deal with such expressions.