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Operating on full-text representations, the effects of searching using
individual words and Boolean combinations of separate words, (univer-
sity AND library AND finance) OR (RAE AND research), can be sim-
ilarly understood. From the model of meaning already established, the
restricted syntagma of the separate word allows a multiplicity of signifieds
to attach themselves to the signifiers when they are effectively released
into their paradigm; the retrieved extended syntagmas exhibit the multi-
valency acquired. The ordinary discourse meaning of words used as search
terms was not stretched in either instance, and their use in retrieved syn-
tagmas was not highly indeterminate. Initially, the inquirer may have held
a nomenclaturistic mental model of query terms as univocal complexes of
signifier and signified. The number of tokens of word types retrieved testi-
fies to the preexistence of words as cohesive and discrete units in the lan-
guage for representation. Using the technical affordances of the time, the
syntagma was restricted to the paragraph for the Boolean combination
university AND library AND finance, , but the search recalled the Queen's
Honors List (syntactically marked as a single paragraph), indicating the
difficulty of defining the paragraph. Informal or experientially acquired
and weakly theoretical understandings of the difficulties posed by the
multivalency of separate words, embodied in facilities for restricting mul-
tivalency by the provision of proximity operators, again preceded their
theoretical articulation.
Phrase
The effects of phrase searching—for example, direct semantic ratifica-
tion, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine, Research Assessment Exercise
(Google 2004)—can be conversely and still consistently understood.
From a linguistic perspective, the extension of the syntagma in the search
and in the retrieved string beyond the separate word reduces the potential
multivalency of the individual words (or the signifieds) that legitimately
can be attached to them as signifiers, in so far as they are accorded sep-
arate signifieds. In the examples given, the search phrase is a relatively
univocal (rather than potentially multivalent) union of signifier and sig-
nified, although the possibility of indeterminacy remains. Phrases could
even be regarded as approaching semantic and possibly historically spe-
cific types of tokens retrieved ( Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine ) rather
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