punctualize

English

Alternative forms

• punctualise

Etymology

punctual +‎ -ize

Verb

punctualize (third-person singular simple present punctualizes, present participle punctualizing, simple past and past participle punctualized)

1. To render as, or turn into, a point; (specifically, sociology) to consider a conceptual or social network as a single point-like entity or “black box”.
   • 2000, Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, →ISBN, page 127:

     One of the complaints sometimes made concerning phenomenology is that it seems to substantialize the self, that it makes the ego into a kind of fixed point that escapes its own history […] But phenomenology does not punctualize the self […]

   • 2006, Magdalena Nowicka, Transnational Professionals and Their Cosmopolitan Universes, →ISBN, page 181:

     Certainly, some networks are easier to punctualize than others. They are network packages, routines, taken for granted.

   • 2015, Joshua A. Braun, This Program Is Brought to You By…: Distributing Television News Online, →ISBN, page 169:

     MSNBC.com in 2010 was a quintessentially postmodern organization […] We can speak of its needs, its managerial decisions, and the systems it builds—we can punctualize it, to use the ANT term […] but in doing so, we must ourselves be reflexive about the fact that we are ultimately employing a construction.

   • 2021, Francis Lee, “Enacting the Pandemic: Analyzing Agency, Opacity, and Power in Algorithmic Assemblages”, in Science & Technology Studies, volume 34, number 1, →DOI, page 88, note 9:

     The black box metaphor in actor-network theory was never meant to be used to describe a stable state of affairs, but to highlight the human and social tendency to punctualize networks of relations in black boxes.

2. (linguistics) To express an action as happening at a specific moment.
   • 1980, Gillian Sankoff, The Social Life of Language, →ISBN, page 318:

     Among indices of the first type, we find not only adverbs like hier ‘yesterday’, but also a variety of other expressions that serve to punctualize or indicate a specific time.

   • 1981, Dee Ann Holisky, “Aspect Theory and Georgian Aspect”, in Phillip Tedeschi, Annie Zaenen, editors, Tense and Aspect, →ISBN:

     Their distribution is complementary insofar as preverbs mark the punctuality of accomplishments (and some achievements), whereas the doni suffix punctualizes activities and states.

   • 1997, Neil Bermel, Context and the Lexicon in the Development of Russian Aspect, →ISBN, page 402:

     The ability to punctualize an act is therefore highly conducive to keeping verbs outside the aspectual system […]

Derived terms

• punctualization