“This was Saussure’s term for what later came to be called paradigmatic relations. The ‘formulaic’ associations of linguistic signs include synonyms, antonyms, similar-sounding words and words of similar grammatical function.” - Daniel Chandler What is "Associative Relations" in Saussure's Theory? Ferdinand de Saussure, a foundational figure in modern linguistics, introduced the concept of associative relations (in French: rapports associatifs ) in his Course in General Linguistics (published posthumously in 1916). This term refers to the mental connections a speaker makes between a linguistic sign (a word) and other signs that are not present in the actual sentence but are linked in the mind through shared similarities. Later linguists (especially after Roman Jakobson and others) renamed this concept paradigmatic relations. Paradigmatic relations are contrasts and choices: they involve words that could potentially replace each other in the same position ...