Belgian Journal of Linguistics - Volume 24, Issue 1, 2010

This thematic issue of the BJL presents eight contributions on the notion of framing, ranging from theoretical to applied perspectives, and reflecting a range of issues on lexico-grammatical and discourse issues. More than forty years after Charles Fillmore’s (1968, 1977) seminal work on case grammar, the general objective of this volume is to show the vividness of the linguistic debate which arose out of Fillmore’s frame semantics. We do so both by bringing together a range of empirical materials reaching from strictly grammatical and lexical to discourse patterns, and by stimulating discussions with other, cognitively or socially oriented models and applications. More specifically, the contributions in this volume cluster around two axes. The first one concentrates on how a form-meaning model of language in frame semantics interacts not only with its ‘sister theory’ of construction grammar (Östman and Fried 2004: 5) and other cognitive frameworks, but also with work on framing from a social perspective. The second axis deals with applying these sister theories to objects and corpora of different dimensions, from lexico-grammatical issues at the sentence level to larger stretches of discourse.

This paper sets out to demonstrate that the complex semantic structure underlying a modal concept such as OBLIGATION can only be characterized relative to a frame (or script) based on — but not limited to — a core force-dynamic configuration. It is assumed that the distributional properties of expressions of OBLIGATION throw light upon the more peripheral components of the script, among which the notion of volition is shown to play a substantial role. It is also argued that this script, conceived as a template, receives further semantic specifications when it is activated in discourse. These specifications account for the various uses of forms expressing the same notion.Finally, it is suggested that an analysis of other modal concepts along the same lines would provide a valuable insight into the semantics of modality as a conceptual category and a key to understanding the linguistic properties of modal expressions.

The current contribution considers the use of the emerging modal forms want to / wanna for the speech act of advice with reference to two cognitive frameworks, viz. force dynamics and frame semantics. It is held that a volitional semantic core is projected in terms of wanting as a force dynamic experience which extends to the addressee as a mental extrapolation. In frame semantic terms the resulting speech act generates a new frame and new participant roles, so that the category “Attempt_suasion” is proposed as an addition for the verb form want in FrameNet. The interprations in terms of both theoretical frameworks are further supported by the case of second person want to / wanna for advice with an added question tag, representing respectively a lifted barrier and a frame shift, and illustrating the added potential of the forms in terms of face, when compared to the modal should.

This paper offers an alternative analysis of Goldberg’s (1995) account of communication verbs appearing in the ditransitive construction. Based on a more finely-grained frame-semantic analysis of constructional phenomena, it is shown that generalizations over specific syntactic frames are possible at different levels of semantic abstraction. This, in turn, allows us to make across-the-board generalizations that hold not only between lexical units evoking the same frame, but also between lexical units belonging to different frames at different levels of abstraction. The resulting network of constructions combines Goldberg’s proposals regarding the status of abstract-schematic constructions with item-specific knowledge regarding the specific lexical units, with various midpoints in between. This approach has the advantage that there is no need for fusing lexical entries with abstract meaningful constructions, thereby avoiding some of the problems that arise due to the separation of syntax and the lexicon in some constructional approaches.

Drawing attention to a rather neglected domain in Construction Grammar analyses, this paper examines the multi-layered nature of speakers’ linguistic knowledge and its manifestation in the emergence of new linguistic structure. In particular, I show that the emergence of certain discourse-sensitive grammatical patterns can be systematically captured by appealing to an intricate interaction between fairly abstract constructional meanings based on metonymic transfer, lexical meanings of words (‘semantic’ frames), and particular discourse-pragmatic functions (‘discourse’ frames, understood as pragmatically grounded schematizations of communicative and discourse-structure conventions). It is the knowledge of all three dimensions that aids speakers in their interpretive tasks. The theoretical issues are demonstrated on a subset of discourse-functional and modal uses of the word jestli ‘if/whether’ in conversational Czech, as attested in the Czech National Corpus.

Ever since Lakoff and Johnson (1980) introduced their Conceptual Metaphor Theory, metaphors have been seen as important ‘framing devices’: as metaphor involves constructing one conceptual domain in terms of another, the choice of the latter (or source domain) affects how the former (or target domain) is represented.Based on a corpus of French written press reporting, this article will, on the one hand, show that the notion of ‘framing’ is, in line with the findings of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, useful for analysing metaphors as well as for indicating their constructive force. On the other hand, however, this article will defend the idea that an analysis of metaphors in terms of frames does not always suffice and needs to be complemented. Following a recent strand in metaphor studies that shows an increasing awareness of the importance of studying metaphors as linguistic and discursive phenomena (cf. Cameron, 2003; Semino, 2008), we will claim that a more co-text-oriented metaphor approach has to be adopted to account for the nuances and evaluative associations metaphors are able to convey.

This paper describes the way Belgian politicians represented themselves, their parties and the political situation in newspaper interviews in the government formation period of 2007. Interviews with four politicians, both in Dutch and in French, have been analyzed in order to reconstruct the image the politicians convey of themselves and of the political parties they stand for, and to reconstruct the frames they apply to the political situation. A critical linguistic and framing analysis shows how this representation is built up through an interplay of names used to describe oneself, the specific use of the pronouns of the first person plural and consistent metaphors. The paper ties in with the theme of this special issue in that it bridges the gap between construction grammar and linguistic discourse analysis: knowledge of social networks (and their evaluation of utterances) is important for analyzing choices between discourse alternatives by discourse agents (as politicians are).

This paper discusses the importance of change in American presidential discourse. Taking the inaugural address as its data, the study proposes a corpus-based analysis of the change frame in American presidential rhetoric. Change will be shown to relate to two levels of analysis using a combined approach of quantitative and qualitative methods. Firstly, its occurrence as a lexical concept in the corpus at hand will be examined. Secondly, the study of extended portions of discourse will demonstrate that meaning representation largely occurs on the basis of motion concepts, including the conceptual metaphor CHANGE IS MOTION as the central mapping of the event structure metaphor system (ESM). As will be shown, the knowledge in the change frame is suggestive of ideological discourse structures, which attach opposing value judgements to the presence vs. absence of change, respectively.

This paper explores the linguistic patterns of instrumentality in the titles of English medical research papers, at the interface between conceptual and linguistic structure, and offers a contribution to the little studied interrelationships between static and dynamic conceptual relations in medical ontology and LSP terminology. It is demonstrated how causal cues constitute the conceptual background against which instrumentals are profiled in the causal chain of the medical model. Taking inspiration from Talmy, frame semantics and construction grammar, the linguistic patterns in which causal and instrumental frame elements are co-activated are transcribed as complex patterns with partial morphological, syntactic and lexical marking of the conceptual relations under study. The paper offers an exploratory typology of causal cues for instrumentals and describes how multiple instruments can appear in medical LSP. The findings are relevant for those interested in the nexus between ontology, constructional aspects of expert language and frame semantics