ABSTRACT
As a graduate student, I studied ethnographic taxonomic analysis (a branch of ethnosemantics, along with componential analysis), which was aimed at elucidating culturally ordered category relationships. The Wittgensteinian and ethnomethodological critiques, with notions such as family resemblance and indexicality, decimated the ethnosemantic approach. Nevertheless, Sacks’s notions of category collections and devices, together with Watson’s (1978) observation that there may be devices within devices, largely reproduced the structural aspects of taxonomic analysis. Sacks’s system, however, dealt with what I take to be two signal weaknesses of taxonomic analysis: (1.) Taxonomic analysis tended to ignore the fact that categories can be created on the spot for current circumstances or for any purpose. (2.) In addition, it failed to adequately recognize that the same item may be variously categorized. In this chapter, I discuss Sacks’s singular contribution to the study of categories as grounded in his fixed concentration on the ways that categories are deployed and organized in specific occasions of verbal interaction (in contrast to the cognitive orientation of ethnosemantics). I describe how this fixation, in turn, is the grounding for occasioned semantics, the study of the emergence and ordering of meaning (especially, but not only, categorial meaning) in talk.
