THE CAT ATE THE MOUSE

Note that the picture (or the relationship between the top phrase that, if you have reached this page at the end of the earlier discussion of syntagmatic discussion, you know as the pre-text for these pages), as such, is not a syntagm to the extent that it is initially apprehended as a whole gestalt. However, it can be made to participate within an interactional syntagmatic chain--as I just have. By doing so I propose an interpretation of the image as an example in a lecture.

This, of course, does not bind any reader of this page who might borrow the image and make it to fit within still another sequence.

Note that this is also a (hopefully more systematic) restatement of how Ruth Benedict's writings about patterns of culture can still be useful, particularly as it relates to what happens when specific forms are borrowed from one population to another (1932). This interpretation, of course, challenges and is challenged by some understandings of hybridity.

However, any of the sequences within which the joke-as-gestalt is set would itself be a syntagm in the Saussurian sense...