Problems concerning the process of subject analysis and the practice of indexing TORKILD LEO THELLEFSEN, SØREN BRIER, and MARTIN LEO THELLEFSEN This article is structured so that it offers the reader some of the basic concepts from C. S. Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics and G. Lakoff’s cognitive semantics in order to provide linguistic tools to describe and elucidate the complexity of indexing, and hopefully to clarify and improve the foundation of indexing. The article is also a further development and application of Brier’s (1996) cybersemiotic approach to library and information science (LIS). It is our hypothesis that Peirce’s semiotics offers concepts and methods that make it possible to analyze and to identify different complexes of problems regarding meaning and therefore describe the ways in which words and signs can stand for texts’ mean- ing. Furthermore semiotics gives us an opportunity to conceptualize the relations between representation of documents and users, which is an important aid in analyzing where problems arise in the indexing and information searching process. Throughout our discussions of the theories we will demonstrate the perspectives this has concerning the effectiveness of indexing and bibliographic representation. This is an area of growing importance because of the exponential growth of produced documents and the growing number of people who, through the Internet, have physical access to these documents or their bibliographic databases. Furthermore, many people now build their own document bases trusting some automatic indexing program while seldom knowing much about the underlying complexity of intellectual access through subject searching by different types of users. Indexing and bibliographic representation is no longer only a specialist’s (librarian, documentalist’s) craft but has become a central task in the information — or rather — document society. Further, we argue that Lakoff’s cognitive semantics offers a method to deal with some of the problems concerning the reference of concepts for different users identified in the semiotic analysis. It is based on his theory of categories, basic levelness, the existence of Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs) as the background for categorization, metaphors, metonymies, and finally our derived concept ‘significance effect’. Semiotica 144–1/4 (2003), 177–218 0037–1998/03/0144 – 0177 # Walter de Gruyter Brought to you by | Copenhagen University Library (Det Kongelige Biblio Authenticated Download Date | 11/9/15 9:57 AM