Explanation
Entextualisation is the transformation of transient speech, performance, or social practice into a bounded, repeatable, and transportable textual form. The process does not neutrally preserve an event. Selection, segmentation, orthography, speaker attribution, and omission create a new object that can be detached from its original setting, quoted, archived, and inserted into other contexts. Minutes therefore preserve not the meeting itself but an institutionally and materially shaped version. Entextualisation enables reach and memory while potentially reducing voice, body, situation, and ambiguity. The concept reveals how documentation helps constitute its object: what previously existed only in performance acquires duration, authority, and new connections, while other properties disappear.
Movement of thought
1. A transient event of speech, action, or performance is first encountered as a temporally and situationally bound occurrence. 2. Selected components are segmented and rendered as written signs, lines, speaker roles, or other textual units. 3. The resulting version partly detaches from its source context and becomes repeatable, quotable, transportable, and institutionally processable. 4. A counter-test reconstructs selection and loss and separates entextualisation from writing alone, technical recording, and an imagined complete copy of the event. 5. The event returns as a textual object: more durable and mobile, yet inevitably transformed by the conditions of its fixation.
Scientific use case
Linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, textual scholarship, and conversation research compare event, recording, transcript, and later circulation. They document selection rules, decontextualisation, and institutional authorisation.
Example
A lively team meeting becomes minutes arranged by agenda, decisions, and attributed speakers; laughter, hesitant entries, and many side remarks disappear from the later quotable text.
Counterexample
An unpublished audio recording technically preserves sound but does not yet organise it into a bounded textual version. Recording alone is therefore not entextualisation.
Distinction
Distinguish entextualisation from literacy as a cultural-medial practice, transcription as rule-governed representation, recording, minutes as a genre, contextualisation, and writing something down.
Effect on thought and perception
Entextualisation gives transient practice duration and reach while transforming it through selection and organisation, and it may grant one version new quotability and authority.
Resonance
A past voice answers from a stable form, but its reverberation has been organised; between event and text remains a productive difference that can never be fully closed.
Cite this entry
Reich, Michael (Hrsg./ed.): „Entextualisation“. Atlas der Sprache, AT-DEP6-0020. ATLAS 260, data model 1.6.0. https://atlasoflanguage.com/concept/AT-DEP6-0020The address remains stable; editorial content may evolve. Editorial reading state: 2026-10-15. Include your access date for precise references.
Historical background
Bauman and Briggs’s 1990 discussion treats entextualization as making discourse detachable and reusable. It concerns recontextualization beyond putting speech into writing; oral performance can also become a bounded repeatable unit. The German history of Verschriftung is therefore not supplied by this broader English theory. Direct retrieval failed in this run; the previous documented review and an indexed excerpt are identified as such.
How conceptual history changes the analysis
Entextualization is not a neutral copy of speech. Selection, segmentation, normalization, omitted features and the new context of use must be documented.
Further explanation
Writing down speech creates a new usable object. Boundaries, punctuation and decisions about pauses or gestures shape what a later reader encounters. This is not a context-free duplication of the event, nor a licence for arbitrary rewriting: consequential choices must be traceable.
Entextualization also concerns making discourse detachable and reusable and need not involve writing. “Putting speech into writing” is a descriptive English counterpart for Verschriftung; the current theoretical headword covers a neighbouring, broader process. Examine the new boundaries and setting while keeping the original occasion recoverable.
Additional example
Original example: “That is good?” versus “That is good!” shows a punctuation choice. The written mark alone does not verify the original delivery.
References for the historical section
- Bauman / Briggs (1990): Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life · Definition and discussion of entextualization
- Bauman / Briggs (1990), Hochschulbereitstellung Bern: Poetics and Performance · Indexierter Abschnitt S. 74–75: entextualization und recontextualization.