Syntagmatic Relationships in Index Languages: A Reassessment

Effective use of syntagmatic relationships in index languages has suffered from inaccurate or incomplete characterization in both linguistics and information science. A number of "myths" about syntagmatic relationships are debunked: the exclusivity of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships, linearity as a defining characteristic of syntagmatic relationships, the restriction of syntagmatic relationships to surface linguistic units, the limitation of syntagmatic relationship benefits in document retrieval to precision, and the general irrelevance of syntagmatic relationships for document retrieval. None of the mechanisms currently used with index languages is powerful enough to achieve the levels of precision and recall that the expression of conceptual syntagmatic relationships is in theory capable of. New designs for expressing these relationships in index languages will need to take into account such characteristics as their semantic nature, systematicity, generalizability, and constituent nature.