Notionalization: The transformation of descriptions into categorizations
| Panel: | P39 - Occasioned semantics: Systematic approaches to formulation in conversation |
| Author: | Deppermann, Arnulf |
| Abstract: | |
| Any particular formulation is selective, aspectual, and constructive with respect to other possible ways of describing or categorizing referents or states of affairs. These properties become an issue for participants themselves when they reformulate a prior version by a subsequent. The paper sets out to describe a specific practice of reformulation: the transformation of a description by a prior speaker into a categorization by the next speaker. Sequences of this kind are a "natural laboratory" for studying the differences between descriptions and categorizations as two of the major linguistic resources for formulation regarding their semantic, interactional, and rhetorical properties. Based on audio data from public political debates, mediation, and psychotherapy sessions, the distinctive features of categorization in contrast to descriptions are captured by the term 'notionalization': • descriptive/narrative versions are often vague and tentative, multi unit-turn versions, which are temporalized and episodic, offering a lot of contingent, situational, indexical detail, • they are turned into condensed, abstract, timeless, agentless categorizations expressed by a noun (phrase) or a verb (phrase) within one TCU, which are often seemingly clear-cut, definite, and purified of indexical details. Notionalization is a sub-class of practices of reducing detail by, e.g., summaries and glosses. It is used for topical closure (by providing a categorical conclusion) and for coining keywords, which can be reused in the interactional future to subsume and recontextualize topical issues and histories of discourse efficiently. While categorizations are used as means for transforming descriptions according to (sometimes one-sided, strategical) practical relevancies and for reducing conceptual and controversial complexity in the service of interactional progression, they can open up sites for arguments over descriptive adequacy and thus re-open the issue they were deemed to settle. |
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