THEORY AND PRINCIPLES LCSH: Semantics, Syntax and Specificity

SUMMARY. This paper looks at changes affecting LCSH over its 100-year history. Adopting a linguistic conceptualization, it frames these changes as relating to the semantics, syntax and pragmatics of the LCSH language. While its category semantics has remained stable over time, the LCSH relational semantics underwent a significant upheaval when a thesaural structure was imposed upon its traditional See and See also structure. Over time the LCSH syntax has become increasingly complex as it has moved from being largely enumerative to in large part synthetic. Until fairly recently the LCSH pragmatics consisted of only one rule, viz, the injunction to assign specific headings. This rule, al-ways controversial, has become even more debated and interpreted with the move to the online environment. [Article copies available for a fe