Under the Umbrella: Goal-Derived Category Construction and Product Category Nesting

Categories are organized vertically, with product categories nested under larger umbrella categories. Meaning flows from umbrella categories to the categories beneath them, such that the construction of a new umbrella category can significantly reshape the categorical landscape. This paper explores the construction of a new umbrella category and the nesting beneath it of a product category. Specifically, we study the construction of the Quebec terroir products umbrella category and the nesting of the Quebec artisanal cheese product category under this umbrella. Our analysis shows that the construction of umbrella categories can unfold entirely separately from that of product categories and can follow a distinct categorization process. Whereas the construction of product categories may be led by entrepreneurs who make salient distinctive product attributes, the construction of umbrella categories may be led by “macro actors” removed from the market. We found that these macro actors followed a goal-derived categorization process: they first defined abstract goals and ideals for the umbrella category and only subsequently sought to populate it with product categories. Among the macro actors involved, the state played a central role in defining the meaning of the Quebec terroir category and mobilizing other macro actors into the collective project, a finding that suggests an expanded role of the state in category construction. We also found that market intermediaries are important in the nesting of product categories beneath new umbrella categories, notably by projecting identities onto producers consistent with the goals of the umbrella category. We draw on these findings to develop a process model of umbrella category construction and product category nesting.

MANIPULATING CATEGORIES IN PUBLIC SPEECHES AND THEIR TRANSLATIONS: COGNITIVE RHETORICAL APPLICATION OF VANTAGE THEORY

The article applies Vantage Theory, which studies the ways of categorization with respect to human orientation in space-time, to revealing three types of manipulating categories structuring the addressee’s worldview: overcategorization, decategorization and new category construction. It is found that overcategorization, aimed at intensifying the parameters constituting the categorical focus, is reflected in the use of words denoting the utmost intensification of the focal categorical parameters, while partial categorization is expressed by the lexical units intensifying focal parameters to a certain degree. Decategorization is shown to reflect five ways of diminishing focal parameters. Similarly to overcategorization, the absolute and partial decategorizations reflect the utmost and fractional loss of focal features respectively; the situational decategorization concerns the reduction of the focal parameters denoted by the inclusive deictic unit we; the generalizing variant is rendered by the units extending the limits of a particular category; the universal type refers to the superordinate categorization level. New category construction consists in representing novel entities by word formation in the Russian original and by construction formation in the English translation with the sender being more daring in these passages than the translator who in the majority of other cases follows the vantage construction suggested by the speaker.

Sorting out the problem of inert knowledge: Category construction to promote spontaneous transfer

A fundamental goal in the study of human cognition is to understand the transfer of knowledge. This goes hand-in-hand with the translational goal of promoting such transfer via instructional techniques. Despite a rich history of research using the analogical problem-solving paradigm, no study activity has been found to produce a robust rate of successful spontaneous transfer—even when the test is immediate. We propose the category status hypothesis as an explanation of the difficulty of transfer and as motivation for a novel approach to promoting transfer. We report a set of experiments evaluating a category construction technique based on a sorting task. In Experiment 1a, we found category construction to be significantly more effective than the ‘gold standard’ of schema abstraction through comparison of two analogous cases. In Experiment 1b, we explored a variation of the category construction technique that did not reliably differ in effectiveness from comparison-based schema abstraction—we also verified that both study tasks were superior to a baseline task of separate summarization of two cases. In Experiment 2, we conducted a replication of the initial design with higher power and confirmed the significant advantage for category construction over schema abstraction via comparison. In Experiment 3, we compared category construction to an information-consistent reading comprehension control in order to evaluate competing interpretations of the category construction advantage found in Experiments 1 and 2. We discuss theoretical and applied implications of these findings.