Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side
of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth” (1889/1996, 280). Saussure's
understanding of the syntagma may have been influenced (partly uncon-
sciously) by models in western and Romance languages.
Word Meaning
The model of signification that incorporates interaction between syntagma
and paradigm can be applied to both the production of meaning from
the individual written word and the sequence. Saussure both endorsed
and developed the structuralist principle that distinguished units obtain
their significance through their difference from proximate units—“
In
the language itself, there are only differences
.” (1916/1983, 118)—and
applied this principle to understanding the meaning of words. Regarding
the meaning of words as produced by mutual differentiations contrasts
acutely with the ordinary view of language as a nomenclature. While
opposing the related assumption in classic information-retrieval research
that the word is a unit of meaning, it does correspond to the experience
of searching full-text systems. In a dialectical development from Saussure,
the surrounding syntagma guides the choice of signified from the para-
digm that attaches to the word in written discourse.
Conceptions of language, implicitly but not necessarily explicitly
accepted in ordinary discourse through their embodiment in the mono-
lingual dictionary, can further illuminate the relation between word forms
and their meanings. In a monolingual dictionary, words characteristically
have many definitions attached to them, and the number of definitions
is influenced by the depth and purpose of treatment. The relation was
acutely noticed by the first modern English lexicographer:
names . . . have often many ideas, but few ideas have many names. (Johnson
1755/1982, 15)
From the first part of this remark, “names . . . often have many ideas,”
the relation between a word form and its meanings can be regarded as
a one to many relation. Therefore multivalency, or having many values,
is confirmed by the monolingual dictionary as a condition of a word's
meanings, with the meanings indicated by definitions given and fully dis-
played by illustrative quotations. The second part of the remark—“few
ideas have many names”—implies that if ideas are extended to include
