Frame analysis
Ministry
of Science and Education of UkraineUkrainka Volyn National UniversityGermanic
Philology Department
on
Prototype Theory:
Frame
analysis
Prepared
bystudent of Group 41Viktoriia
Lutsk
- 2009
PLAN
Introduction
1. Defining cognitive linguistics
2. What frame analysis is
. Applications of frame
analysis
INTRODUCTION
Cognitive
linguistics is taken to refer to the approach to the study of language that
began to emerge in the 1970s and has been increasingly active since the 1980s
(now endowed with an international society with biennial conferences and a
journal, Cognitive Linguistics). A quarter century later, a vast amount of
research has been generated under the name of cognitive linguistics. Most of
the research has focused on semantics, but a significant proportion also is
devoted to syntax and morphology, and there has been cognitive linguistic
research into other areas of linguistics such as language acquisition,
phonology and historical linguistics.analysis is a type of discourse analysis
that asks, What activity are speakers engaged in when they say this? What do
they think they are doing by talking in this way at this time? Consider how
hard it is to make sense of what you are hearing or reading if you don't know
who's talking or what the general topic is. When you read a newspaper, you need
to know whether you are reading a news story, an editorial, or an advertisement
in order to properly interpret the text you are reading. Years ago, when Orson
Welles' radio play "The War of the Worlds" was broadcast, some
listeners who tuned in late panicked, thinking they were hearing the actual end
of the world. They mistook the frame for news
instead of drama.
1. DEFINING
COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS
Frame analysis
belongs to the domain of cognitive (i.e. related to mental processes of
perception and reasoning) linguistics.linguistics is an approach to language
that is based on our experience of the world and" the way we perceive and
conceptualize it. It endeavours to explain facts about language in terms of
known properties and mechanisms of the human mind/brain.suggested by Ungerer
and Schmid, cognitive linguistics is today represented by three main
approaches: the experiential view, the prominence view, and the attentional view
of language.main claim of the experiential view is that instead of postulating
logical rules and objective semantic features on the basis of theoretical
considerations, a more practical and empirical path should be pursued. For
example, one can ask language users to describe what is going on in their minds
when they produce and understand words and sentences. As experiments have
shown, people will not only state that, for instance,
a car has a box-like shape, that it has wheels,
doors, and windows, that it is driven by an engine and equipped with a steering
wheel and brakes. It
will also be mentioned that a car is comfortable and fast, that it offers
mobility, independence and perhaps social status. Some people may connect the
notion of car with their first love affair, or with injury if they were once
involved in an accident. By adding these attributes, people include
associations and impressions which are part of their experience. These
attributes collected from laypersons seem to reflect the way we perceive the
world around us and interact with it.cognitive approach is concerned with the
selection and arrangement of the information that is expressed. For example,
the sentence The car crashed into the tree might be a description of the
circumstances that led to the car's breakdown. This sentence seems to describe
the situation in a fairly natural way. In comparison, other ways of relating
the accident such as The tree
was hit by the car seem somehow strange and
unnatural. The reason is that the moving car is
the most interesting and prominent aspect of the whole situation and, therefore
we tend to begin the sentence with the noun phrase the car. The selection of
clause subject is determined by the different degrees of prominence carried by
the elements involved in a situation. This prominence is not just reflected in
the selection of the subject as opposed to the object and the adverbials of a
clause, but there are also many other applications of what may be called the
prominence view of linguistic structures.prominence view provides one
explanation of how the information in a clause is selected and arranged. An
alternative approach is based on the assumption that what we actually express
reflects which parts of an event attract our attention, and it can therefore be
called the attentional view.
2. WHAT
FRAME ANALYSIS IS
The main
descriptive devices of frame analysis are the notions of frame and perspective.
The notion of frame
was introduced into linguistics by Charles Fillmore in the middle of the 1970s.
We will look at his classic example of the
'commercial event' frame.start with, Ch. Fillmore considers the aspects of the
situation described by the English verb buy. In the initial state, a person A
owns money and another person or institution D owns some goods that A wants to
have. Taking for granted that the two participants come to an agreement on the
price of the goods, person A gives a certain sum of money to D and D surrenders
the goods. The final state is that A owns the goods and D owns the money.
Leaving the agreement aside as some sort of prerequisite, one could then say
that the action category BUY includes a reference to at least four other
categories; a BUYER, a SELLER, GOODS, and MONEY.are viewed as unified
frameworks of knowledge, or coherent schematizations of experience;
cognitive structures knowledge of which is
presupposed for the concepts encoded by the words;
cognitive models which represent knowledge and
beliefs pertaining to specific and frequently recurring situations.,
a frame is an assemblage of the knowledge we have about a certain situation,
e.g., buying and selling.a frame for buy seems to offer at least two
advantages: a
single frame can account for various clause patterns and it can be applied to
different (though related) verbs like sell, cost, or charge.following sentence
exemplifies a syntactic pattern in which buy a may occur: David bought an old
shirt from John for ten pounds. In this sentence all four components of the
[BUY] frame are rendered linguistically, each in a different syntactic slot;
the BUYER (David) as subject, the GOODS (an old shirt) as direct object, the
SELLER (John) as the first adverbial, and the MONEY {ten pounds) as the second
adverbial. This assignment of syntactic roles is called the syntactic perspective
of the sentence.perspective
of the above example largely hinges upon the syntax of the verb buy. It is
possible to put a different syntactic perspective on the same frame by using
the verbs sell, cost, change. Choosing the verb sell would allow us to put the
categories SELLER and GOODS into perspective as subject and object, with the
possibility of referring to the BUYER as an indirect object, as in John sold an
old shirt to David for ten pounds. The verb charge perspectivizes the SELLER
and BUYER as subject and object as in John charged David ten pounds for an old
shirt, and the verb pay the BUYER and MONEY, with an option to introduce the
SELLER as indirect object as in David paid ten pounds to Uohn for an old
shirt.[BUY] frame is not just useful tool for the syntactic description of the
verb buy, but it can also be applied to the verbs sell, charge, pay. The
difference between the four verbs is simply a change of perspective within the
same frame. This difference can be indicated by highlighting those components
of the frame that make up the subject
and object for each verb.four diagrams below show that the two verbs buy and
pay describe the commercial event from the BUYER'S perspective, while sell and
charge perspectivize the situation from the SELLER'S point of view
obviously, the
notion of perspective relies on the principles of prominence (which indicates
that different facets of an action can be highlighted by choosing certain
linguistic structures), but it includes more than that.analysis has a wider
scope, because indirect objects and adverbials are also addressed. In other
words, the principle of prominence applies to those elements in a sentence that
attract the main part of our attention and are therefore prominent; the frame
analysis, however, also has something to say about linguistic items that
attract only a small portion of our attention potential.wider scope of the
frame approach shows up in the fact that the [COMMERCIAL EVENT] frame even
captures cognitive categories whose prominence is so low that they are not
expressed on the linguistic surface at all. Two verbs where this is the case
are spend and cost, as used in the examples David spent ten pounds on an old
shirt and The old shirt cost David ten pounds.verbs imply a SELLER who cannot
be rendered linguistically (it is put in brackets). Instead the perspective
directs the attention to the BUYER and the MONEY when spend is used, and to the
GOODS when the verb cost is chosen.
frame analysis
knowledge situation
3.
APPLICATION OF FRAME ANALYSIS
can provide
valuable tools for the linguistic and conceptual analysis/ Frame analysis has
bee successfully applied to research into semantic and grammatical (mainly
syntactic) issues as well as some important problems in contrastive
linguistics, translation studies, artificial intelligence, text comprehension,
studies.working in the frame paradigm are interested in problems related to the
meaning of the verbs that belong to a frame. The frame notion has already been
used for detailed semantic analyses of a number of verbs (e.g., speak, talk,
say, tell; risk
) and this has
developed into the project of a frame-based dictionary.frame approach presents
a unified view of syntactic patterns. A sentence can be analyzed as an instance
of the event-frame (event-frame analysis).Talmy
[1991]
dealt with conceptualization of various types of
events and the language we use to talk about them. For instance, six cognitive
components are distinguished in the conceptual structure of a motion event,
namely FIGURE, GROUND, PATH, MOTION, MANNER, CAUSE. All these components occupy
typically specific positions in sentences, as shown in the following examples.MOTION
MANNER PATH GROUNDpencil rolled off the table.pencil lay on the table.
MOTION CAUSE PATH GROUNDpencil blew off the
table.pencil stuck on the table.six components are not of equal importance. It
is perfectly possible to conceptualize a motion event whose CAUSE is unknown.
Similarly, and of course this is particularly frequent for locative events, the
manner, in which an object moves
often is not expressed. By contrast, it is impossible to think of a motion
without invoking each of the other four components, figure, GROUND, PATH, and MOTION. The outcome of these
observations is that figure,-ground, PATH
and MOTION are felt to belong together as the central and defining elements of
the motion event. Taimy extends this idea of аn
identifying core structure of an event to other
event types and arrives at the definition of the notion of event-frame: a set
of conceptual elements and relationships that are evoked together or co-evoke
each other can be said to lie within or constitute an event-frame, while the
elements that are conceived of as incidental whether evoked weakly or not at
all - lie outside the
event-frame.the
basis of this definition L.Taimy has identified the following five types of
event frames: motion event-frames, causation event-frames, cyclic event-frames,
participant-interaction event-frames, and interrelationship event-frames.of the
central elements of the motion event PATH may be expressed through the verb, as
in French entrer and Spanish entrar. In view of this, French and Spanish are
verb-framed languages. Conversely, PATH can be rendered by a preposition, as in
English go into, or by a verbal prefix, as in German hineingehen. Hence, English
and German can be called satellite-framed languages.. Talmy
has argued that probably all languages of the
world can be categorized in terms of verb-framing and satellite-framing. The
group of verb-framed languages includes all Romance languages, Semitic
languages (as Arabic and Hebrew), Japanese and many others. Satellite-framed
languages besides English and German are all Indo-European languages (apart
from the Romance languages), Finno-Ugric languages and Chinese.applying
event-frame analysis to the comparison between different languages and between
different narrative texts researchers make some interesting observations.
Apparently, a satellite-framed language such as English is better suited for
descriptions of MANNER, and elaborate PATH
descriptions including dynamic descriptions of locations along the PATH. The
reasons are that in satellite-framed languages MANNER is often incorporated in
the verb meaning, and the information on the PATH and setting can be expressed
in the same clause as the motion event by opening attentional windows. Since
Spanish is a verb-framed language, descriptions of motion events tend to be
restricted to the motion itself. Often the description of MANNER is only
possible at the cost of extended and rather awkward constructions. Similarly,
if details of the PATH and the setting
are to be given, they are expressed in additional clauses. As this will
sometimes slow down the pace of narratives considerably, Spanish speakers may
opt for fewer MANNER and PATH details in favour of a more vivid MOTION
description.is
not the only discipline where frame analysis has been applied with quite
impressive results. Another important field of research has been artificial
intelligence that studies the ability of computers to behave like human beings.
Here, the frame notion has been used in a more general, though also more
technical, way than in linguistics. In this use of the term, the relevance of
frames extends over the boundaries of single sentences to much larger
linguistic and cognitive unitsnotion of frame was introduced into artificial
intelligence as an attempt to equip computers with with necessary world
knowledge. The computer scientist Marvin Minsky defined a frame as a
datastructure for representing a stereotyped situation. This is a remembered
framework to be adapted to fit reality by changing details as necessary.idea is
that a cognitive category PLANE, for example, would activate a whole bundle of
other categories which belong to the same [flying on the plane] frame., for
example PILOT, FLIGHT ATTENDANT, LIFE VEST, SAFETY BELT, FIRST CLASS, ECONOMY
CLASS and so on. All these categories and the specific relations that exist
between them are part of the frame and must somehow be fed into the computer.
In addition to this rather general frame there are many so-called subframes
which capture the knowledge of still more specific situations of a
flight.[FLYING ON THE PLANE] frame exhibits a very predictable temporal
structure in which one stage is often a prerequisite for the next stage. If we
view the flight from such a sequential perspective, we go beyond simple frames
and move into the so-called scripts, i.e. knowledge structures that are
particularly designed for frequently recurring event sequences.
CONCLUSIONS
Frame analysis
belongs to the domain of cognitive (i.e. related to mental processes of
perception and reasoning) linguistics.linguistics is an approach to language
that is based on our experience of the world and" the way we perceive and
conceptualize it. It endeavours to explain facts about language in terms of
known properties and mechanisms of the human mind/brain.main descriptive
devices of frame analysis are the notions of frame and perspective. The
notion of frame was introduced into linguistics by Charles Fillmore in the
middle of the 1970s.are
viewed as unified frameworks of knowledge, or coherent schematizations of
experience; cognitive
structures knowledge of which is presupposed for the concepts encoded by the
words; cognitive models
which represent knowledge and beliefs pertaining to specific and frequently
recurring situations.,
a frame is an assemblage of the knowledge we have about a certain situation,
e.g., buying and selling.
LITERATURE
1. Fillmore Ch.C. Frames and the
Semantics of Understanding // Quaderni di Semantica. - 1985. - Vol VI. - P.
222-254
2. Minsky M.A. Framework for
Representing Knowledge // The Psychology of Computer Vision / ed. P.H.Winston.
- New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. - P. 211-277
. Talmy L. Force dynamics in
language and cognition // Cognitive Science. - 1988. - Vol. 12. - P. 49-100
. Ungerer F., Schmid H.J. An
Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. - Harlow: Longman, 1996