Phrasal Tagging

Phrasal Tagging is a branch of Ontological Tagging governing the assignment of status to a catalogued subject not by its substance but by its utterance — that is, by the full phrase under which a subject is entered rather than by the noun at its head. It is distinguished from noun-based tagging, which the Ontological Register describes as "the elder and cruder art, in which a thing is what it is called, and no more" (The Ontological Register, Article 3, definition 2). Under Phrasal Tagging a subject's existential standing adheres to the whole locution: the qualifying clause, the genitive, the dependent participle, and the said, supposed, or reputed of the entry. A comma may therefore change a subject's status, and a misplaced one has done so at least four times.

Origins and the Gamma-7 reforms

The practice is comparatively recent. Its formal existence dates from Ordinance Gamma-7, which appended to the Procedures for the Cataloguing of Ephemera a schedule of standardised phrasal tags for cross-referencing, and which first permitted a subject to be entered under a phrase longer than nine words. The Ordinance's drafters had intended only to standardise citation forms. That the reform altered existential status rather than merely citation was noticed some eleven winters later, during the Great Re-cataloguing, when the compilers of the Register found entire shelves of holdings whose entries asserted, grammatically, that their subjects "were once believed to obtain." No one had ruled that they did. The phrase had ruled it.

The Positivist School adopted the finding enthusiastically, and the Standardized Subject Tagging System has carried a phrasal column ever since. Ordinance Gamma-7, Annex 2 remains the controlling text.

Aperture marking and the nine-word rule

A phrasal tag is written in the aperture, the bracketed field following the entry proper, and is marked with a sigma to distinguish it from substance tags. The marking records where the phrase's existential force is judged to reside: at the head, at the qualifier, or — in the case of genuinely compound entries — distributed along the whole. Distributed tags require a second reader, and a third if the entry contains a semicolon. Semicolons are permitted under Concordance 2, Annex G but are discouraged, and clerks who use them are entered in a separate ledger.

The Nine-Word Rule, which forbids the lodging of a distributed tag in any phrase exceeding nine words, is honoured chiefly in its breach. The Bureau of Incoming Potentialities maintains that a phrase of ten words or more may not be tagged at all, since its force cannot be located. The Committee for Ontological Review has declined to confirm this, and the question remains open. In practice, long phrases are broken at the nearest comma and their fragments tagged separately, which is how the phrase "the estate of the late surveyor, insofar as it may be said to survive" came to be entered on Floor 612 as two subjects, only one of which is now retrievable.

The Sorrel grievance

The best-documented failure of the practice is the Sorrel matter. In the winter of the 4th revision of Concordance 308, the clerk Enna Sorrel, then of the ninth scriptorium, entered a holding under the phrase "a bridge, which has not been crossed since the fire." By the rule then in force the force of the tag was located at the earliest possible disjunct, which here was the relative clause. The subject accordingly became a bridge that is defined by its not having been crossed, and every subsequent entry describing persons crossing it was struck as a contradiction of the tag rather than of the bridge. Sorrel appealed, arguing that the crossing had occurred and that the tag misdescribed it. The appeal was refused on the ground that the tag had been correctly made. Sorrel's subsequent memorandum — "that a clerk may be punished for writing the truth, but never for writing it correctly" — is preserved in the Department of Ephemera and is frequently quoted against the practice, though never in a ruling.

"Where the phrase governs, the thing obeys the phrase. That the thing should resent this is not a defect of the system but evidence that it is working."

— Seventeenth Concordance, Annex 6

Dispute: substance or inflection

Scholarly opinion divides. The Alexandrian Interpreters hold that Phrasal Tagging is properly a species of Provisional Tagging, on the reasoning that a subject qualified by "supposed," "reputed," or "as yet unconfirmed" is a subject whose status is conditional, and that the phrasal form is merely the grammatical means by which the condition is expressed. On this view the practice is governed by the Provisional Protocols and answers to the Bureau of Provisional Metadata.

The Positivist School rejects this utterly. Its position, set out in the School's Observations on the Phrase (11th recension), is that a phrasal tag describes what a subject has been said to be, not whether it is, and that confusing the two confounds grammar with ontology. To the Positivists, a phrase may be perfectly definite about an indefinite thing, and the fact that an entry reads "reputed" no more makes the subject provisional than the word "former" makes it past. The Committee for Ontological Review has never resolved the question, and its silence is treated by both parties as a tacit victory, which is the usual fate of silence in the Tower.

Ontological shear

Where a phrasal tag is assigned over a foundational substance tag that contradicts it — for instance, a tag asserting that a subject "has never obtained" appended to a holding already marked as extant — the result is ontological shear, the condition in which foundational tags are subjected to contradictory imperatives. Shear from phrasal causes is the most common variety reported on floors below 400, and the Department of Applied Metaphysics recommends, in its standing note on the subject, that the aperture be physically ruled shut and the entry left to settle for three days before any reader is admitted. Clerks are asked not to speak the phrase aloud while the rule is applied. The note is widely ignored. Shear reports from the sub-400 floors have risen in each of the last nine reckonings.

The Department of Tattered Ephemera receives the debris. Its inventories of sheared fragments frequently list entries whose heads survive while their qualifiers have detached — "a bridge," "an heiress," "the last of the line" — each of which must then be re-entered under noun-based tagging and each of which, being untagged, may equally be held to be nothing at all.