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cally powerful, particularly for understanding full-text retrieval, but sel-
dom explicitly made. It could be expressed economically in terms of the
interaction of more fundamental and materially rooted categories, with-
out distorting those categories.
Conclusion
Therefore, we can state summarily the account of the production of mean-
ing in human consciousness for the reception of written language already
developed. In written language, word meaning is regarded as produced
from human mental action—semantic labor—at the intersection of syn-
tagma and paradigm. The experience of meaning, as distinguished from
the mechanism for the production of meaning, is understood as an event
in consciousness. The concept of meaning is not reduced to that of defini-
tion or paraphrase, and the meaning of a particular word is not identified
with any acceptable definition or paraphrase given. Meaning is regarded
as strongly analogous to the signified. The concept of the signified has
the conceptual advantage of an established place in a series of systematic
distinctions, particularly differentiated from signifier and sign, while the
concept of meaning obtains greater richness from its resonance with ordi-
nary discourse.
The conception of meaning developed is consistent with the existing
sources recognized as relevant to understanding information retrieval,
but also develops dialectically from them. The idea of language as nomen-
clature, with a one-to-one relation of word to object, continues to be
rejected while the counter notion of meaning as produced by difference
is accepted. In a dialectical development, the idea that language is not a
nomenclature is no longer left as the partly unexplored term of a contrast
or antithesis. The mechanism for selection from differentiating meanings
is given a definite and materially specific form of human mental labor
at the intersection of the syntagma with the paradigm. Possibly assisted
by the focus on the material aspects of communication, the dangers of
mysticism and extreme relativism, present in existing sources, have been
avoided. The particular nature of the mechanism for selection from differ-
ent meanings identified also has a significant analytic value from full-text
retrieval, from its elements of congruence, with the current rematerializa-
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