Chapter 1 Introduction
1.4. Outline of the Thesis
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(2) Frame on pragmatic level－including discourse structure, illocutionary acts, and Cooperative Principle－can be manifested by stylistic variation.
(3) The distributions between linguistic choices (of both strategies and features) and selection of functional strategies for surface representation of frame are patternized.
(4) Frame does have hierarchical structure, the existence of which can be verified by stylistic variation.
1.4. Outline of the Thesis
This study is composed of five sections. The first chapter introduces the motivation of this study, the research questions, and the related hypotheses. The second chapter reviews definitions and theories related to frame analysis, pragmatic functions related to frame, and stylistic variation. The third chapter describes the research design of this study, which includes data collection, measurement, and criteria for data classification. The fourth chapter presents data analysis and discussions. The last chapter summarizes the major findings and describes limitations and suggestions of the study.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
This chapter reviews definitions and theories related to frame analysis, pragmatic theories, and stylistic variation.
2.1. Frame Analysis
2.1.1. The Definition of Frame
To define what a frame is, the concept of expectation should be examined first. The concept of expectation has been discussed in many fields. Related scholars, to name few, include Bartlett (1932), Rumelhart (1975), and Abelson (1975) in psychology; Bateson (1972), Hymes (1974), and Frake (1977) in anthropology; Goffman (1974) in sociology; Minsky (1975) in artificial intelligence; Fillmore (1975) and Chafe (1977) in linguistics. Different terms－
including schema, script, and frame－are used to refer to the concept of expectation.
Bartlett (1932) proposes that schema is dynamic, which is always active and developing through time. Hymes (1974) regards the notion of frame as a means of speaking. In order to interpret utterances correctly, hearers must know what frame they are engaged in. Schank & Abelson (1975:151) give a classical example to describe the notion of script－the restaurant script. The example is given below:
John went into the restaurant. He ordered a hamburger and a coke.
He asked the waitress for the check and left.
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In this example, definite article “the” is used to refer to “the waitress” and “the check” which do not mention before. Schank & Abelson take this definite article “the”
as linguistic evidence of the existence of script.
Chafe (1977) proposes that the process of verbalization is composed of three stages. The first stage is to identify what the event is, and to determine what frame will be applied, including determining what roles interlocutors play. The second stage is concerned with construction of syntactic structure. At the last stage, lexical choice is determined. All these terms can be summed up to Bateson’s notion－frame and Ross’s (1975) concept－structure of expectation, with which people use their prior experience in a given culture to predict and interpret new information, events, and experiences.
Goffman (1974) points out that frame can help people to understand the incoming message and respond to events. Tannen (1993) adopts Goffman and other scholars’ notions and develops the definition of frame. According to Tannen (1993:14),
“In order to function in the world, people cannot treat each new person, object, or event as unique and separate,” indicating that people, based on their prior experiences, make sense of the world. In other words, with the frame in mind, people perceive, interpret, and verbalize things around them.
2.1.2. Footing and Frame
Goffman (1981:128), in his investigation of footing shifts within interaction, finds that footing not only can shift from one to another, but also can be embedded
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within one another, which is called lamination of experience.
Based on Goffman’s notion of footing, Tannen (1991) purposes that footing is also a kind of frame that can be used to identify the relationship between interlocutors;
therefore, footing shift can be regarded as frame shifting. Tannen (1986:91) also suggests that “frames are constantly evolving lines of interpretation, continually negotiate footings.”
Tannen (1986) gives an example to explain footing and frame. Imagining a card checker of swimming pool does not let you go into the swimming pool when you forget to bring the card. He says, “How do I know you’re not trying to sneak in?”, or he may say “I wish I could let you in. I don’t think the policy makes sense either, but I can’t go against policy.” In the first one, the footing of the card checker is “me and the policy against you,” which leads to opposition; while in the latter one, the footing of the card checker is “you and me against the policy” that he tries to show empathy, not opposition. This example shows that different footings may identify different relationships between interlocutors.
Another example is Hoyle’s (1993) study that she investigates the sportscasting speech activity which constructed by three 8- and 9-year-old boys when they play games. Hoyle finds that these children can manipulate footing shifts in their play. In the sportscasting frame, the boys play the role of sportscasters. However, when they conduct footing shift, they pretend they are interviewing an imaginary player, playing the role of interviewer. Their footings are continuously changing with the ongoing game. In other words, the changes of their footings display their shifts of frames.
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2.1.3. Message and Metamessage
Hoyle (1993:114) suggests that all messages involve implicit metamessage.
Bateson (1972) uses the term “metacommunicating” to refer to the notion of frame.
Tannen (1986:86) proposes that “metacommunicating itself carries a metamessage of involvements.” Therefore, meaning is composed on at least two layers, one is message (or surface meaning), and the other, metamessage (or intended meaning).
Tannen (1986:88) gives an example, in which a woman takes a trip to London to visit her friends on Christmas holiday after she gets divorced. When the holiday is over, a male friend of her says, “You don’t have to go all the way to London not to be alone on Christmas. Next year you can spend Christmas with us.” The woman thanks for her friend’s kindness, but she feels offended. The message of the male friend’s speaking is meant to be an invitation, but the metamessage implies the woman’s pathetic attempt to avoid being alone on Christmas Day. Tannen concludes that such a confusing communication is owing to the conflict bind of message and metamessage.
2.1.4. Interactive Frame V.S. Knowledge Schema 2.1.4.1. Types of Frame
According to Tannen & Wallat’s (1987) study, the concepts of frame can be divided into two categories, one is interactive frame (i.e. frame), and the other is knowledge schema (i.e. schema). Interactive frame, being regarded as “dynamic”,
refers to a definition of knowing “what is going on in interaction” or “what activity is being engaged in” (Tannen & Wallat, 1987:59).
Bateson (1972) suggests that people have to know which frame is being applied
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in the discourse, so they can decode the message without misunderstanding. Likewise, Ortega y Gasset (1959:3) points out that before understanding a statement, people should know which frame is being selected in the communication.
As for knowledge schema, it refers to participants’ “expectations about people, objects, events and settings in the world” (Tannen & Wallat, 1987:60). Compared with interactive frame, which is dynamic, knowledge schema is rather static. In order to understand the meaning in discourse, people should “fill in unstated information which is known from prior experience in the world” (Tannen & Wallat, 1987:60).
2.1.4.2. Interaction of Frames and Schemas
It is necessary to elaborate how frame and schema can interact with each other and influence the way people communicate. Tannen & Wallet (1987) discuss interaction of frames and schemas by giving Tannen’s own experience as example.
One time, she is talking on the phone with a male friend, her friend suddenly yells
“YOU STOP THAT!” She knows that this interjection is not indicating to her, but the friend’s dog. She can distinguish such reference because her friend uses a specific prosodic representation which is only used to address the dog. Besides, “YOU STOP THAT!” is more likely to appear in the frame “disciplining a pet” rather than “talking to a friend.” She can also infer that her friend may talk to a misbehaving child owing to her knowledge schema since she knows that the friend has a child. These
“expectations” about what the friend might be speaking to indicate that frames and schemas interact with each other then influence people’s comprehension.
Another example about interaction of frame and schema shows that mismatch
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of knowledge schema will lead to frame shifting. In Tannen & Wallet’s (1987) study, they investigate a pediatrician’s register shifting during the examination, and they find out that frame shifting can be triggered by the mismatch of knowledge schemas.
When the pediatrician is reporting some typical symptoms of cerebral palsy to the camera what she thinks that is normal for people who have the disease, the patient’s mother who has no professional medical knowledge schema will interrupt her, asking whether it is symptoms of illness. The pediatrician adopts register shifting, shifting from technical terms to simple words, to explain the ordinary symptoms to the mother.
It is this shifting from examination register to consultation register that exemplifies the matching between interactive frame and knowledge schema.
2.1.5. Evidence of Frame
2.1.5.1. The Peer-story Experiment
It seems like frame interplays with people all the time, but it is hard for people to be conscious of its existence. A film-telling experiment reveals the existence of frame. Chafe (1977) conducts an experiment by showing a six-minute short film to a group of participants, and asks them to tell the content of the film to someone. In this experiment, it is found that the ways which the participants organize and describe the film are varied. Besides, some informants change the content of the film. Tannen (1993) contends that how participants organize their narrations and why they change the content of the film are related to their structure of expectation (or frame). Also, in comparing the oral narratives of Greek and Americans participants, Tannen notices the ways they do the narratives are frame determined which is culturally determined.
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For instance, it is showed that American participant are more aware of being a film viewer than Greeks, many of them give criticism to the film.
In addition, in this film-telling experiment, participants are involved in interview that they are aware of being recorded. Both participant’s expectation about the film and the expectation of being as a film viewer would influence how the film is to be perceived and verbalized. Using the concept of frame to discuss this issue, several frames are interplayed with each other in this film-telling event, includes film-telling frame, interview frame, storytelling frame, and so on. For example, some participants mention that there is no dialogue in this film that they are conscious of the film-telling activity. When the film-telling frame is salient, participants may mention or comment on film viewer’s point of view when do the narrations, such as mentioning the sound track, sound effect, and verisimilitude in the film. They apparently feel that they should talk about the point of the film or give some comments when telling about a movie. This is owing to the frames in their mind that direct them what they should see or what they should talk about.
Investigating the film-telling narrations, Tannen (1993) categories several linguistic phenomena which can be regarded as evidences of frame, includes omission, repetition, hedges, and negatives. Take omission for example, when telling the film, some participants may mention or emphasize specific details (such as a goat in the film), while the others, due to their culture backgrounds, would not. Using the concept of frame to explain these differences, “a man with a goat in the country” is a common scene in Greek’s frame which is viewed as unmarked, so it is less important to report.
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While in American’s frame, seeing a man with a goat may not so common; the scene is marked and is worth-mentioning. Frame acts like a filter which operates a selection process, and determines what should be emphasized and what could be omitted.
Moreover, take evaluative language for example, when describing the pear picker in the film, some Greek informants portray him as a “tall” pear picker, while American participants do not mention this characteristic. This may be owing to cross cultural differences in frame: Americans may regard the pear picker as average height according to their frame, but for Greeks, the height of the pear picker is not so common in their frame. Tannen (1993) concludes that frame can not only influence the way people what and how to perceive things, but also the way they verbalize things which they perceive.
2.1.6. Frame Shifting
2.1.6.1. Reframing the Frame
Tannen (1986) suggests that frame can be reframed. She gives a personal example about how she reframes the frame to avoid confrontation. One time when she is lecturing, a couple sitting at the front of the room keep interrupting her. She thinks the better way to deal with the situation is not to start a battle frame, debating and arguing with the couple, but to jump out of the frame and say, “There are seventy-five people in this room. You’ve already asked a lot of questions; let’s give some of the others a chance (Tannen, 1986:86-87).” She reframes the frame to shift her attention from the couple to the other audiences. This effectively blocks the interruption from the couple, and more importantly, avoid confrontation.
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2.1.6.2 Register Shifting
To understand how people manipulate with frames, it is needed to investigate linguistic forms as evidence to discuss people’s underlying expectation. Goffman (1974) proposes that linguistic forms can be used as cues or markers to see how frame is manifested.
In Tannen & Wallet’s (1987) study, they investigate a pediatrician’s register1 shifting during the examination as the linguistic evidence of frame shifting. In the pediatric interaction, the pediatrician has to deal with three addressees: the patient which is a little girl, the girl’s mother, and the future audience of the recorded videotape who may watch it for research usage. It is found that three kinds of registers are applied by the pediatrician in order to talk appropriately to different addressees.
First of all, the pediatrician uses motherese to address the little girl, and she applies teasing register that sounds like they are playing games. She exaggerates shift in pitch, lengthens vowel sounds, and with a smiling facial expression to get the little girl’s attention. Afterwards, when she explains the examination to the mother, she shifts to conversational register. She uses simple words to explain the result of examination which are easy to understand for normal people. And then, she applies reporting register when she reports the findings to the camera. She uses many technical terms with flat intonation and applies third-person pronoun “her” to refer to the girl when doing the report. During the examination, the pediatrician shifts from
1Ferguson (1985) defines the term register as “variation conditioned by use;” that is, people use particular lexicons, syntactic structures, prosodic aspects depending on the contexts, so that such linguistic features are regarded as “appropriate.”
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one register to another; register shifting in these speech activities illustrates frame shifting. Tannen & Wallet (1987:65) propose that “each of the frames entails addressing each of the audiences in different ways.” They also discover that sometimes frame can’t be embedded with each other: the pediatrician cannot apply both examination frame and consultation frame at the same time. Tannen and Wallet (1987) suggest that avoidance of such conflict verifies the existence of frame.
2.1.7. Interaction of Frames 2.1.7.1. Yield or Resist the Frame
There are two ways when dealing with the frame set by others: to yield the frame, or to resist the frame.
Tannen (1986) gives an example to describe the two ways. A car approaches an intersection when two pedestrians, a women and a man, want to cross it. The driver stops the car and signals them to go first. In this situation, the frame set by the driver is that it is the driver’s credit to let the pedestrians cross first. While in fact, it is not the driver’s magnanimity since the law requires drivers to do so. The women who yields the frame crosses the road quickly to show her appreciation to the driver. In contrast, the man signaling the driver to go first resists the driver’s frame showing that it was his credit to let the car go first. Tannen points out that when dealing with the frame which is set by others, people can choose to yield or resist the frame.
2.1.8. Levels of Frames
Goffman (1981) proposes the notion of lamination of experience that not only frame can shift from one to another, but it can be embedded within another. In Hoyle’s
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(1993) study, she investigates the sportscasting speech activity which constructed by three 8- and 9-year-old boys when they play games. She finds out that one frame can be embedded with other frames which proves that there can be levels of frames existed in one activity.
Tannen (1993) proposes that frames have levels. According to Tannen, there may be more than one frame intertwined or overlapped with each other. Tannen also suggests that a speech event is composed of a larger “context” and the “content” of communication. In the peer storytelling experiment, she proposes that the larger context is the interview frame that participants are aware of being recorded so they have certain expectations about how to act in the interview. Interview frame is the overriding frame of this speech event, and there are other subordinate frames (such as
the film-telling frame). In other words, the former is that part of the frame on higher hierarchy, while the latter is on lower hierarchy. When participants try to retell the film, their expectations about the story in the film and being a film viewer come into play. Therefore, Tannen suggests that frames have levels which include overriding frame or other subordinate frames, and that they may intertwine and interact with each other. The illustration of overriding frame and subordinate frame is presented in Figure 1.
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Figure1. Overriding frame and subordinate frame
2.2. Discourse Structure
Since stylistic variation for frame by discourse structure is analyzed in this study, including both narrative structure and conversational structure, a review of these two types of discourse structure is given below.
2.2.1. The Structure of a Narrative
Labov (1972:359) defines narrative as “method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which actually occurred.” He proposes the structure of narrative; as he asserts, a fully-formed narrative structure is composed of six elements: abstract, orientation, elaboration (complicating action), evaluation, solution or resolution, and coda.
To describe the elements of narrative structure in an easier way, Labov regards them as a series of answers to underlying questions:
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The larger context Overriding frame
The content of communication Subordinate frame
The content of communication Subordinate frame
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a. Abstract: what was this about?
b. Orientation: who, when, what, where?
c. Complicated action (Elaboration): then what happened?
d. Evaluation: so what?
e. Result: what finally happened?
1. Abstract
According to Labov (1972:363), abstract is the part which “encapsulates the
According to Labov (1972:363), abstract is the part which “encapsulates the