Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
approach, incorporate existing sources recognized as revealing, and coin-
cide with practical understandings; but it also should develop dialectically
from these bases and may draw upon further material.
To obtain deeper insight into inescapable issues of semantics and syn-
tax—the production of meaning from written language and replication
and differences in words and words sequence—requires further theoreti-
cal contexts. Therefore, the principal sources selected are Saussurean lin-
guistics (for understanding semantics) and information theory (for insight
into syntactics understood as patterns of replication and difference in
written language), both continually informed by the theory of computa-
tion. Selection power is understood to be inescapably produced by human
selection labor that modulates over time.
Chapter 6: A Semantics for Retrieval from Full Text
This chapter is concerned with developing a semantics for written lan-
guage that incorporates crucial distinctions for understanding retrieval
from full text. Established and materially rooted categories in Saussurean
linguistics, the syntagma and paradigm—the linear sequence of utterance
and the network of associations a word acquires outside a particular syn-
tagma—are adapted to a largely unprecedented purpose: an account of
the production of meaning from written language. The inheritance of pat-
terns for the production of meaning and the occurrence and recurrence of
words and phrases from oral and written language are also acknowledged
and placed in dialogic encounter with the possibilities of computation.
Chapter 7: A Syntactics for Retrieval from Full Text
Understood as the occurrence and recurrence of patterns, the syntactics of
written language are equally relevant to understanding retrieval from full
text. Material elements from information theory—the message and mes-
sages for selection from a source that correspond directly to the categories
chosen from Saussurean linguistics—are adapted to gain understanding
of patterns in written discourse, which then can be directly and humanly
exploited in searching. The theory of computation continues to inform the
understanding of patterns of occurrence and recurrence, particularly for
operations that effectively include cutting of words from a line of writing,
consistent with the fundamental computational operations of writing,
erasing, and substituting symbols.
