1. systematic arrangement of all the inflected forms of a word
2. a standard or typical example;
"he is the prototype of good breeding"
"he provided America with an image of the good father"
3. the class of all items that can be substituted into the same position (or slot) in a grammatical sentence (are in paradigmatic relation with one another)
4. the generally accepted perspective of a particular discipline at a given time;
"he framed the problem within the psychoanalytic paradigm"