oversignification

English

Etymology

over- +‎ signification

Noun

oversignification (plural oversignifications)

1. The process or result of oversignifying; (attachment of) excessive significance (to something).
   • 2012, Ulka Anjaria, Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 61:

     If contingency defines a realist ideal, then oversignification threatens that ideal. Yet in a context where meaning, whether national, cultural, or so on, is not a given, but the object of desire, oversignification offers a certain attraction.

   • 2012, Daniel Herwitz, Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony, Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 167:

     Second a story about how the synergy of media in any particular case differs from that of another and what the political effects are of this difference in candidate excess or oversignification. To understand the aestheticization of politics today, ...

   • 2004, Nicole Christine Raeburn, Changing Corporate America from Inside Out: Lesbian and Gay Workplace Rights, U of Minnesota Press, →ISBN, page 66:

     Likewise, although Disney had no such antigay record, it seems equally plausible that its reputation as the “traditional family values” company led to a similar process of oversignification in the lesbian and gay community.

   • 2017, Nicholas Nace, Charles Altieri, The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time, Northwestern University Press, →ISBN, page 16:

     Oversignification refers instead to the properties of language itself as performed in the work. Oversignification allows Javier to break from the model of lyric as privacy overheard (on which Hejinian is very precise) to stress the multiplicity […]