Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
signifier alone. Therefore, both the message and the syntagma can refer to
a common object—the sequence of written language—with an underly-
ing assumption or principle of linearity, albeit to different aspects of that
object (the message to expression alone and the syntagma incorporating
expression and content and the relation between them).
Once messages for selection are accepted as individual characters of
the Roman alphabet, the message of written English can be understood
at interconnected levels of granularity, differentiated as character or let-
ter, word, and multiple or multiword sequences. In some special cases,
an individual character demarcated by spaces or a punctuation mark
and space can function as a word (the space itself can be considered as
a character or message for selection, corresponding to the real material
experience of selecting messages from a collection of moveable type or
a keyboard). Both the word and the multiword sequence can be more
fully understood from the perspective of information theory, specifically
by treating the line of writing as the message of information theory.
Message and Messages for Selection and Occurrence and Recurrence of
Units
From the interaction between messages for selection and the message, we
can construct an understanding of the word and multiword sequence that
is consistent with and complementary to understandings in Saussurean
linguistics, but more fully developed. The intersection of syntagma and
paradigm was transformed into a crucial element for a model of the pro-
duction of meaning for written language, embracing and differentiating
the word and phrase. Analogously, the combination of the messages for
selection into the message can yield a syntactic or pattern-based under-
standing of the word and multiword sequence. The distinction between
the levels of analysis of semantics from syntax is maintained and paral-
lel and complementary understandings are developed. The messages for
selection continue to be understood as individual characters, and the line
of writing as compounded from the messages for selection, with the word
as a demarcated group of characters and the multiword sequence as a lin-
ear concatenation of such groups. An informal, rather than arithmetically
expressed or statistically formulated, but still sufficient understanding
