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This chapter adapts the framework for analyzing the representation of social actors (cf. chapter 2) to the domain of visual communication. After discussing the critical import of analyzing orientational dimensions of visual imagery such as the gaze, social distance, and angle, the chapter discusses the exclusion of social actors from visual discourses, the way images can allocate roles to social actors, the way images can represent social actors specifically or generically, and as individuals (individualization) or groups (assimilation), and the ways in which images can categorize social actors (biological and cultural categorization). To bring out its potential for critical discourse analysis, the framework is used in an analysis of white representations of blacks.

The objects that we select and how we put them together depend on our current goals, the task before us, and on our language and culture. It may be argued that concepts are not fixed, stable entities in the mind. Nevertheless, people do bring general knowledge to bear to understand objects and events. This chapter focuses on the structure of that general knowledge, in particular, on its causal structure. Research is presented that uses a variety of measures of categorization. The most frequent is naming — objects are assumed to belong in the same category if they are called by the same name.

This chapter raises some of the interlinked matters that have been very much at issue in press, television, and the world wide web since September 11. First is the role of the imagination itself, and of the unimaginable, in experiencing and categorising what we have difficulty understanding, and its role in our coming to terms with and coping with difficult matters of any kind. Second are the social interaction processes of categorisation and re-categorisation. Third is the contribution to our understanding provided by attention to the play of tropes in social life, and to the importance of tropology to our anthropology. Fourth are the multitude of moral issues and their claim upon our actions and reactions: the morality present in religious fundamentalism, for example. But also now under intense and renewed debate is the morality of political assassination, of racial profiling, of the employ of weapons of mass destruction. And fifth, in all of this and everywhere we find the disease of reification/entification of our newly realised world historical problem, the increasing disparity of well being. These are the diseases of language investigated here.

This chapter reviews studies of rule-based category learning within the human adult literature, and contrasts these results with evidence for similarity-based accounts of category learning (e.g. exemplar and prototype models). Specifically, the chapter considers the contrast between rule-based versus similarity-based learning within research on unsupervised (spontaneous) categorization and supervised categorization. In the closing sections, it also presents and critically evaluates hybrid models of human adult categorization that are composed of both a rule and a similarity component.

This chapter focuses on how infants learn categories in familiarization and habituation tasks — a context that provides both deep understanding into the processes of categorization and mimics many of infants' real-life encounters with objects in important ways. Five specific questions about how infants learn categories are addressed: (1) Is innate/previously acquired structure required to explain learning? (2) Which aspects of the environment support learning? (3) What kinds of learning processes are evident? Are these specific to a domain, or more general? Do they change with development? (4) What is the nature of the representations derived from learning? (5) How does previous learning generalize to new instances? It is argued that infants' performance in familiarization tasks should be seen not as a means of simply tapping the knowledge infants have acquired outside the laboratory, but also as a means of tapping how infants learn information given that existing knowledge.

Humans are sophisticated information-processors, and categorization reduces the complex array of information in the world to manageable units that can be readily processed. Categorization is ubiquitous to intellectual and social life, and the contributors to this volume are among those who have helped to delineate how the mechanisms that support categorization develop, particularly very early in childhood. Examining the origins of categorization in human infants requires clever methodologies, but not simply because infants have negligible labeling abilities and poor motor control. It is challenging to investigate infants' categorization of real-world objects for the very practical problem that actual instances of vehicles, furniture, animals, or tools may simply be too large, dangerous, unpredictable, or unwieldy ever to be used in infancy laboratories. Thus, researchers have devised clever techniques of assessing preverbal concepts with tasks that involve pictures or models representing real-world referents. This chapter reviews evidence in support of the thesis that some of these very techniques have contributed to conflicting patterns of results that have fueled debate over single- versus dual-process accounts of early categorization and, more generally, the need to distinguish perceptual and conceptual categorization processes. In particular, it is argued that infants' performance on categorization tasks may be distorted by their fragile understanding of the symbolic media used to represent real-world categories in the context of such tasks.

This chapter presents a framework for analyzing how the participants of social practices can be, and are, represented in English discourse. It outlines and exemplifies the social and critical import of the categories of this framework and details the realization of each category. After discussing the discursive exclusion of social actors and the role social actors can play in discourse, the representation of social actors as groups (assimilation) and as individuals (individualization), the ways in which actors can be categorized (e.g. functionalization, categorization, relational identity) and the metonyms and abstractions that can conceal human agency behind institutions (institutionalization) or behind the means of action (instrumentalization) is addressed. A newspaper article about immigration is analyzed to bring out the potential of the methodology for critical discourse analysis.

This chapter begins with an overview of research in cognitive science, focusing on processes of categorization. For centuries, writers in the West regarded categories as fixed and immutable, and any variation in categorization was taken as evidence of the failure of the human intellect to deal with the structure of the real world. However, the pioneering work of Eleanor Rosch and others in the 1970s showed that category structure was not as simple as first believed. In particular, some levels of categorization are preferred over others, and some members of a category are regarded as better representing the category than others (a phenomenon known as graded membership).

This chapter addresses the problem of what counts as a work of music. This problem, usually called the problem of musical ontology, is viewed as one of cultural knowledge. It is shown that as opposed to being hopelessly recondite, the problem is of immediate importance for understanding music. By approaching the entire work of music as a category — a category that includes all the scores, performances, representations, and such that are said to be “of” the piece — a model is developed for the cultural knowledge upon which judgments about musical ontology are made. Determinations of what counts as an instance of a particular musical work are thus one of the ways members of a musical community construct and negotiate their identity. Two songs taken from the traditions of popular music and jazz are used as examples: “I Got Rhythm” and “Bye Bye Blackbird”.

Cognitive Grammar represents one approach to cognitive linguistics, which in turn belongs to the functionalist (as opposed to the formalist) tradition in linguistic theory. Its central claim is that grammar is meaningful. More specifically, grammar forms a continuum with lexicon and is fully describable as assemblies of symbolic structures (form-meaning pairings). Lexicon varies with respect to the complexity of expressions and the degree of specifity of the meanings symbolized. Grammar varies along the same dimensions, being distinguished from lexicon primarily on the basis of being more schematic in regard to form as well as meaning. Cognitive Grammar is a usage-based approach, in which linguistic structure is seen as emerging by abstraction from usage events, i.e. the reinforcement of what is common across multiple instances of language use in interactive contexts. The theory is highly restrictive in what is posited, limiting linguistic units to structures that are either directly apprehended as parts of occurring expressions or else derive from such structures by the general cognitive phenomena of schematization and categorization.

Language is both cognitive and sociocultural, consisting in conventionally sanctioned patterns of communicative activity. These patterns take the form of schemas abstracted from usage events by the reinforcement of recurring commonalities. Conventional linguistic units are linked by relationships of composition and categorization (either elaboration or extension) and thus form intersecting networks of great complexity. Expressions are interpreted and assessed for well-formedness through categorization by linguistic units. Through a process of interactive activation, particular units are selected to categorize particular facets of an expression. The total set of categorizing relationships constitutes the expression's structural description, and whether the categorizations involve elaboration or extension determines its degree of conventionality. Despite the absence of explicit prohibitions, this model affords an account of distribution, restrictions, and judgments of ungrammaticality. One aspect of grammatical constructions is their characterization at different levels of specificity, including constructional subschemas incorporating specific lexical items. And since one aspect of lexical items is their occurrence in particular constructions, lexicon and grammar are overlapping rather than disjoint. The model accommodates degrees and kinds of regularity, which decomposes into generality, productivity, and compositionality. Regularities include higher-order generalizations, where sets of categorizations or lexical behaviors are themselves schematized to form productive patterns. Among the phenomena described in this manner are patterns of phonological extension (phonological rules), patterns of semantic extension (e.g. general metonymies), and patterns of morphological realization (like conjugation classes).

The etymology of the term lollard remains a source of dispute among scholars: was it coined in the heat of the academic controversies in the University of Oxford in which John Wyclif and his followers played such a prominent role, or was it a pre‐existing term of abuse only retroactively applied to Wycliffites and their supporters? Examining the ways in which discourses about lollardy have inadvertently shaped our assumptions and research agendas, this chapter proposes a new model for thinking about the category ‘lollardy’, a model that draws not only on the traditional disciplines of literary, historical, and theological studies but also on those of psychology and biology. This model has the potential not to solve the mystery of which inhabitants of late medieval England were and were not lollards but, rather, to help students of lollardy ask more helpful questions of the sources.

Language contains both large generalizations and idiosyncratic facts, and therefore we unavoidably find those who favour lumping and those who favour splitting. The constructionist approach to grammar offers a way out of the lumper/splitter dilemma: the approach allows both broad generalizations and more limited patterns to be analysed and accounted for fully. In particular, constructionist approaches are generally usage based: facts about the actual use of linguistic expressions, such as frequencies and individual patterns that are fully compositional are recorded alongside more traditional linguistic generalizations. This chapter consolidates evidence that such a usage based model is required to account for the synchronic state of grammar. Relevant findings in the non-linguistic category literature are also reviewed.