CATEGORIZATION AS AN AD HOC PROCESS IN DISCOURSE

When speakers interact, they constantly co-construct categories, guiding each other towards an incremental and dialogic process of reference identification. Yet what do we know about the actual role played by language in category construction? While the cognitive literature on categorization has mainly understood language as reflecting categorization and providing (more or less precise) labels to name concepts, a closer look at naturally-occurring data shows that the role of language goes far beyond mirroring cognition. Speakers’ morphological, syntactic, and discursive choices indeed crucially contribute to category construction, creatively modifying ‘labels’ available in the lexicon and incrementally leading interlocutors to a shared target.