deconflation

English

Etymology

de- +‎ conflation = deconflate +‎ -tion

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -eɪʃən

Noun

deconflation (countable and uncountable, plural deconflations)

1. The act or process of deconflating.
   • 2003, Charles J. Kowalski, “Sham surgery: not an oxymoron. Commentary.”, in American Journal of Bioethics, volume 3, number 4, →DOI, pages 8–9:

     However, in doing so, the principle of equipoise—recognized by many as the primary ethical justification for an RCT, any RCT—loses some of its force. You might still find it, but the emphasis is elsewhere: on "social value," on "scientific validity," on "independent review," on "respect," on "informed consent." Important values all, but by deconflating research from treatment, investigators are relieved from the constraints of the personal-care principle and the absolute prohibition against doing harm. The deconflation has defeated equipoise.

   • 2010, Dirk Geeraerts, Herbert Cuyckens, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, Oxford University Press, →ISBN:

     If parents and others regularly use see in contexts where it can mean either 'perceive visually' or 'learn; find out'—as in Let's see what's in the box versus Let's see what this bell sounds like—children may hypothesize a sense of the term which conflates literal and metaphorical meanings from the adult point of view, and later need to perform a process of deconflation before they understand that there are two distinct senses of the word, linked by a conventional pattern of metaphor.

2. An instance of deconflating.

Related terms

• deconflate