A user has manifold points of departure from which he may look for the treatment of a particular aspect of the language. One is based on a certain linguistic term that he thinks would be mentioned in the treatment he is looking for. For this approach, the comprehensive presentation comprises, as an appendix, an alphabetical index of terms.

While this may be the most direct access to information in case the user's term and the author's term coincide, it will not help if the user does not know under which term the author treats the phenomenon or concept that he is intrested in. In this situation, the user only has to decide whether the perspective of his question is onomasiological or the semasiological. In either case, he will then use the hierarchical structure of the table of contents of the part of the description chosen and take a top-down approach to the item looked for.