Edwards1991

From emcawiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Edwards1991
BibType ARTICLE
Key Edwards1991
Author(s) Derek Edwards
Title Categories are for talking: on the cognitive and discursive bases of categorization
Editor(s)
Tag(s) Discursive Psychology
Publisher
Year 1991
Language
City
Month
Journal Theory and Psychology
Volume 1
Number 4
Pages 515–542
URL Link
DOI 10.1177/0959354391014007
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

Download BibTex

Abstract

This paper begins by drawing a distinction between cognitive and discursive approaches to linguistic categorization, and it is argued that cognitive approaches have ignored the prime importance of discourse. Rather than attempting to reject or refute the cognitive orientation in favour of a social alternative, it is argued that talk enlists cognition as a powerful element in the rhetoric of description and reality construction. Important features of categorization, such as prototype structures, in-definiteness of membership, indexicality of application and contrastive organization are shown to make sense as features designed for the situated rhetoric of talk, rather than for displaying a person's abstracted understanding of the world. It is argued that cognitive theories, while providing important insights into semantic organization, manage to sustain the explanatory primacy of perception and cognition only through the use of methods that systematically remove from view the flexibilities and action orientation of talk, while using imaginations of situated talk as a basis for semantic analysis.

Notes