I see cats.

I see frustration.

The word cats serves to separate from the world of experience a particular type of animal, while the word frustration represents something quite different. Frustration is associated with the verb frustrate which sounds and looks very much like it and has a similar meaning. The verb frustrate is the name of a process by which someone/something is frustrating someone. Using the kind of visual representation we developed previously in our discussion of the linguistic process of deletion, we have,

FRUSTRATE (something/someone doing the frustrating, someone being frustrated)

So, when the therapist (or any native speaker of English) hears the sentence,

I see frustration.

he can, by checking his intuitions about the meaning, discover that there is more implied by the sentence than actually appears on the surface. Specifically, we have,

In the example we are presenting, the linguistic process of using a noun for a verb description (the process of nominalization) also includes the process of deleting the information associated with the original verb description.

In the transcript, Dave uses two nominalizations, confusion and dependency. As the therapist continues to try to comprehend the present family system and what its members want, he encounters these nominalizations. As is typical of nominalizations, so much of the material associated with the verb of process representation has been deleted that the therapist cannot fully understand Dave's communication. The following exchanges then occur: