Frame analysis

Abstract

Scholars in many disciplines of the humanities and social sciences have used the notion of ‘frame’ to analyze language, discourse, interaction, cognition, news, interaction, and social movements, thus showing the multidisciplinary conceptual relevance of the notion. Inevitably this also means that the notion has been used in many different ways and to describe many different phenomena. For a journal like Discourse Studies, the relevance of frame analysis is obviously related to its possible applications in the description of specific structures of text or talk. Such as been the case in cognitive linguistics in the study of the conceptual frames defining word meanings, undoubtedly related to the structures of knowledge, notably initiated by the work of Charles Fillmore in the 1970s. Similarly, the semantic structures of sentences may be organized by an underlying schema of actor roles (Agent, Patient, etc.) that also could be called a frame, also studied by Fillmore. These semantic frames are related to the structure of mental models of situations and events that have become very popular in the psychology of discourse processing since the 1980s, for example, to explain fundamental notions such as coherence and phenomena such as memory of discourse, for example, in the work of Philip Johnson-Laird, Walter Kintsch, and myself. Beyond the scope of the grammar of words and sentences, long time the limited field of linguistics, also larger schematic structures of discourse may be, and have been, analyzed in terms of frames, such as the canonical structures of everyday storytelling, already proposed by Labov and Waletzky in a seminal paper of 1967. Indeed, such is more generally the case for many other schematic structures of text and talk (sometimes also called ‘superstructures’), such as the conventional organization of scholarly articles (Title, Abstract, Introduction, etc) or interaction rituals, starting with Greetings and closing with Leave-taking in informal everyday conversation. Also in the 1970s, it was Erving Goffman’s influential book Frame Analysis that explicitly introduced the notion of ‘frame’ relating discourse, interaction, and cognition, and hence connecting sociology and anthropology with linguistics, discourse, and conversation analysis. It was in the 1980s and 1990s, within this multidisciplinary conceptual context, and especially inspired by Goffman’s book, that sociologists Robert Benford and David Snow in the new ‘cultural’ paradigm of research on social movements introduced the notions of ‘frames’ and ‘framing’ in the study of many aspects of social movements, such as ‘diagnostic’ frames as initial definitions of a social problem. Also as a critical reaction 1155086 DIS0010.1177/14614456231155086Discourse StudiesEditorial editorial2023