Abstraction

Abstraction. The materialization of a meaning in its context by conventional agreement and arbitrary connection between ideal and material, neither denoting a thing in a way that would be obvious to those not party to social agreement as to its meaning, nor pointing directly to a referent.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 37.