Chapter J

Indexing Language

Abstract

As a system any language has three elements: vocabulary, semantics, and syntax. The semantic relationships are “fixed” by the structure of the language-system, whereas the syntactic ones are “selected” during the utterance of particular messages. A natural language is one which people use in their day-to-day communication. It is possible to use natural language in indexing, but such use creates several problems, especially in manual indexing. These problems make it necessary to have a separate language for indexing which has the “power to control vocabulary, flexibility to show relation of different concepts and facility to build up a searchable file providing access to all possible access points of users.” ...

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