Abstract
Introduction
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 to earlier paradigms in social movement research, such as resource mobilization and political process models, inspired by political and economic notions, their interest in cultural phenomena such as discourse, (inter)action, meaning, understanding, and ideology, required new analytical methods. The notions of ‘frame’ and ‘framing’ played that role, soon applied in a vast number of empirical studies by many other scholars of social movements.
At the same time, something very similar happened in communication research, for instance in the work of William Gamson and Robert Entman, also in search of a method for the qualitative study of news, such as the structures that define the specific focus or importance of news events. Based on their work, also in this discipline the notion of ‘frame’ became very popular as a method for the study of news, sometimes closely related to research on social movements, for instance in the work of Gamson himself.
It is not surprising that after half a century of research on frames in several disciplines and applied to many related but different phenomena of the structures of text, talk, interaction, and cognition, it has become inevitable that such a broadly used notion loses some of its analytical specificity. Thus, from the perspective of multidisciplinary discourse studies, increasingly interested in research on social movements, the question arose what structures sociological applications of the notions of ‘frame’ and ‘framing’ were exactly analyzing.
To stimulate the debate, I wrote a critical review of the uses of the notion of ‘frame’ in social movement research and invited scholars in this field, as well as linguists who had used this notion, to comment on my article or to summarize and illustrate their own theory of frames.
From the outset, I need to apologize if my critical review of the uses of the notion of frame suggests that all empirical studies using this notion in social movement research are uninteresting. On the contrary, the phenomena studied in this research are relevant and fascinating, and their sociological analyses illuminating. The point of my critical review is merely that from the point of view of linguistics and discourse studies the uses of the notion of frame in these studies could be methodologically refined in terms of more specific structures and strategies of text and talk and their underlying cognitive representations. Conversely, the important contribution of cultural social movement research to linguistics, discourse analysis, and cognitive science is that the analytical notions in the disciplines of language, discourse, and mind should also be used to study socially and politically relevant problems, issues, and data, such as social protest and inequality.
Though hardly a complete state of the art of the study of frames, this special issue is another attempt to encourage cross-disciplinary cooperation between the social, cognitive, and language sciences, especially also in the uses of analytical notions and the kind of phenomena they study.