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identical or similar to one another. It also corresponds to an aspect of
the strongest sense of paradigm as the associations a word can acquire
when considered outside a specific context in discourse or in a syntagma.
In retrieval, the syntagma of search words are restored, and the diversity
of meanings likely will exceed expectation. The searcher implicitly may
have held a nomenclaturist model of meaning. In summary, search and
retrieval reveals the distribution of specific units of the paradigm in sys-
tems; the human searcher can recover varied meanings, whose diversity
can encounter a prior conception of meaning, possibly more restricted
than intended.
We can also reveal the sense of paradigm uncaptured. Words connected
in meaning but lacking similar patterns (part of the primary or fullest
sense of paradigm) are not immediately recovered. Human semantic labor
could be used to link such words together in either description or search-
ing. This chapter has methodologically excluded human semantic descrip-
tion labor from the consideration of retrieval from full text, but it has
exposed one highly significant source for its potential additional value, of
linking semantically connected but syntactically unrelated units together.
Syntagma and Paradigm and the Production of Meaning in Written
Language
Interaction between syntagma and paradigm can be made into a crucial
element in a powerful semiotic model of signification. For Saussure:
In its place in a syntagma, any unit acquires its value simply in opposition to what
precedes, or to what follows, or to both. (1916/1983, 121)
Although
value
is a difficult and multivalent term in Saussurean linguistics
(Harris, 1987, 118-123), it can be regarded in this passage as correspond-
ing to meaning, or signified. The primary concern here is with the recep-
tion (rather than the production) of written language, separated from the
possibility of immediate dialog with its producer. In receiving the written
syntagma, the choice of attaching value to the word as signifier3
3
would
characteristically be guided by the signifieds or values attached to words
preceding and following syntagma. Different languages would differ in
the extent and position—before or after—of the relevant syntagma. Mark
Twain suggested, “Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence,
