Primjena lingvistike u stvaranju umjetnih bibliotečnih jezika za označavanje sadržaja knjiga
The Application of Linguistics in the Development of Library Languages for Book Content Designation

Summary/Abstract: Classified and alphabetical subject catalogues were developed in libraries reflecting the book content and subject as well as the kind of the work and the form of the text. They were developed on the basis of knowledge from logic, philology and linguistics. Linguistics has prevailed recently and for this reason they are called »indexing languages« and »retrieval languages«. The aim of this paper is to inform linguists about the successful application of linguistics in librarianship and establish a dialogue with them. We suppose that they will understand the ideas put forward in this article, because linguists are frequent library users and they read bibliographies. In addition to differences in the means of expression - symbols of classified catalogue and natural language words from the alphabetical subject catalogue - these two catalogues have essential properties of any language in common: dictionary, grammar and speech. Dictionaries and grammar are helping devices (library classification scheme, thesaurus, codes and instructions), whereas librarians perform speech by means of catalogue headings. This language is referential according to the Jacobson's classification of languages. The theory of alphabetical subject catalogueshows that both the explanation of subject headings and the adopted terminology were influenced by logic, especially by the idea of categories, which did not prove to be helpful. The subject heading was regarded as a title of the subject, but relatively lately it came to be understood as a kind of a sentence. This idea was formulated by librarians I. Dahlberg from Germany and D. Austin from Great Britain. The author of this paper made a research in the syntactic nature of the subject heading. Being supported by Croatian linguists she created the Syntactic(al) System for Subject Designation (SSSD). In this system the subject heading components are understood as part of the sentence (subject, atribute, predicate, object, adverbials of place and time) instead of being understood as concepts i. e. representatives of large conceptual categories. Correct interpretation of a subject heading and transfer of sense of the document content are insured by symbols which are assigned to sentence components. Adequate software will facilitate the search of the wanted subject because it will enable subject retrieval by all the access points.

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