Abstract
This paper analyses one specific conversational practice of formulation called ‘notionalization’. It consists in 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 regarding their semantic, interactional, and rhetorical properties:
Descriptive/narrative versions are often vague and tentative, multi unit turns, which are temporalized and episodic, offering a lot of contingent, situational, and indexical detail.
Notionalizations turn them into condensed, abstract, timeless, and often agentless categorizations expressed by a noun (phrase) within one turn constructional unit (TCU).
Drawing on audio- and video-taped German data from various types of interaction, the paper focuses on one particular practice of notionalization, the formulation of purportedly common ground by TCUs prefaced with the connective also. The paper discusses their turn-constructional and morphological properties, pointing out affinities of notionalization with language for special purposes. Notionalizations are used for reducing detail and for topical closure. They provide grounds for emergent keywords, which can be reused to re-contextualize topical issues and interactional histories efficiently. Notionalizations are powerful means for accomplishing intersubjectivity while pursuing (sometimes one-sided) practical relevancies at the same time. Their inevitably perspective design thus may lead to re-open the issue they were deemed to settle. The paper closes with an outlook to other practices of notionalization, pointing to dimensions of interactionally relevant variation and commonalities.
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Notes
Although there are clear cases, the distinction between gist and upshot is very hard to draw in many cases, both semantically and pragmatically. This holds also for several of the cases discussed in this paper.
There are still other linguistic resources to do this, which are less often used, like das heißt (this means) and du meinst (you mean). The explication of inferences which are treated to be communicated by the partner needs to be distinguished from formulations which are framed as being unilateral inferences from the recipient's point of view (with no implication made that the producer of the prior account has intended the meaning made explicit by the formulation) and from formulations which are framed as expressing a mere or even improbable inference (see “Other Practices of Notionalization”).
Still, also can be used for various other functions as well, e.g., for indexing self-repair, projecting dispreferred activities, or opening up a lengthy narrative (Alm 2007; Konerding 2004). Note, however, that the specific semantics and discursive function of also depends on its position within sequences and turns. Also used as a marker of formulation is distinctive in terms of being produced turn-initially (rarely turn-medially) in the TCU which follows a description or narrative produced by another speaker.
In my data there is only one case where an adjective is used for nominalization.
Langacker (2008) claims that the basic semantic property of nouns and NPs is to conceptualize their referent as a discrete entity.
See Duranti (2004) for a survey on the linguistics and pragmatics of agency.
However, “des (belaschtet mich)” (this (stresses me), line 007) can be understood to be the antecedent of "die angst um den partner". So, "angst um den partner" would be a analeptical substitute to be completed by the verbal phrase from the patient's last TCU.
In data from informal conversations, no also-notionalizations occurred.
If we are to define this inferential property more precisely, we need to say that, according to the psychotherapist’s theory, depression causes listlessness and problems of concentration as its symptoms. This causal relationship can be inferred from the fact that “depressive stimmung” is the first list item having the others as its sequel, but causality is not obviously indexed in what can be seen as being just a list of symptoms on a par.
See Bolden (2010) for similar cases of formulating unarticulated upshots of stories by and-formulations.
The therapist continues to use “erklärungsnöte” and morphological variants of it in the subsequent course of the therapy session as an explanation for the patient’s problems.
In order to provide for long-distance co-reference, expressions (words, phrases, etc.) must be specific enough in order to co-refer distinctively. Abstract and compound nouns do this job perfectly well, because they are much more rarely used than the more concrete basic-level words, which are generally preferred (see Rosch 1978).
Still, PRO does not accept this categorization either.
The abstract categorization may as well be put first and be expanded only afterwards (cf. Bilmes this volume).
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Acknowledgments
I thank Jack Bilmes for comments on a prior version of this paper and Almut Helmes (University of Freiburg/Germany, Institute of Psychology, Dept. Rehabilitation Psychology and Psychotherapy) for the permission to use the data from the corpus “Behaviour therapy”.
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Deppermann, A. Notionalization: The Transformation of Descriptions into Categorizations. Hum Stud 34, 155–181 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9186-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9186-9