Natalia Knoblock - Frame semantics in the study of speaker's strategies

The proposed presentation is a result of a cross-disciplinary research project that utilized elements of political linguistics, frame semantics and pragmatics. We studied the manipulative strategies employed by the candidates during the American presidential debates of 2004 between G.W. Bush and J. Kerry. Looking for more objective criteria for identifying authors’ strategies we turned to the tools that frame semantics could provide us. We found this method combined with contrastive analysis to be an effective way to overcome the problem of subjectivity some studies of authors’ strategies demonstrate. Since the concept of war was the key question of those debates, we analyzed the frames of that concept aspresented by the participants. The nature of political discourse, a manipulative type of communication, determines that the „construct“ that the speakers present to the audience might or might not reflect their true understanding of the concept. That’s why the comparison of the authors’ frames of „war“ gives us clues to the cognitive mechanisms employed in their construction.    We analyzed such factors as nature and number of frame elements, their inter-connections in the discourse of a particular speaker, and also nominative density of categories and frequency of particular words. As it was expected, the resulting frames showed substantial differences. In accordance with their communicative goals the speakers built their individual concepts of „war“ that were quite different from each other. In the presentation we analyze the frames and describe such strategies as meaning substitution, transfer of evaluative background, generalization, detailizaton, evaluation switch and windowing.