CATEGORY DEVELOPMENT BASED ON SEMANTIC PRINCIPLES

Category systems extracted from textual material are an important part of the scientific process and qualitative analysis but are frequently developed on an ad-hoc basis. Their development can be improved by a stronger reliance on linguistic and semantic principles. Tracing and r ecapitulating the development of semantic principles from the 1950s to the 1990s in linguistics and text analysis show how the principled us e of information from lexical resources can facilitate the development and analysis of category systems. These principles are demonstrated i n examining the category systems of Minnesota Contextual Content Analy sis, a technique for analyzing textual material from sentences, answer s to open-ended questions on questionnaires, expository texts, and ver batim transcripts. These principles are then extended to show how to a bstract category assignments for this type of textual material. The di scussion identifies computerized systems and data resources used in th e application of these principles.