frame |
Working Definition:
The “virtual space” or “mental map” of experience deployed to organize the various elements of an experience in a discourse about it.
NOTE: “There is a close connection between the concept of frame and that of foregrounding.” Lee, Cognitive Linguistics, 8. Taking a vantage point to describe an experience creates a spatial arrangement within which the elements of the scene of the experience is enclosed. With respect to abstract conceptions, frames are “categories.”
Disciplinary Definitions:
The term has a vexed history of definitions. See Deborah Tannen’s “What’s in a Frame,” Framing in Discourse, 14-56.
"a good understanding of the word wicket requires a significant amount of knowledge that extends well beyond the dictionary definition. We refer to this background knowledge as the 'frame'." The frame is not in itself what is generally thought of as 'the meaning' of a word but it is nevertheless crucial to an understanding of it" Lee, Cognitive Linguistics, 2004. 8)
("In principle everything that a speaker knows about the world is a potential part of the frame for a particular term, even though some aspects of that knowledge base are more immediately relevant to a particular term than others (and therefore more strongly activated when the term is used)." Lee, Cognitive Linguistics, 2004. 8)
Comments:
Notes
See Marvin Minsky's conception of a frame (e.g., A Companion to Cognitive Science, 61)
A frame is a data structure representing stereotypical situations in terms of features that are always true of such situationns, as well as terminal slots for features which may take on a variety of different values but must be assigned some value in a given situation. For example, in looking at a room from a given viewpoint, there will always be walls in the scene, but several options for the color of the walls. Slots will generally have default values associated with them, but these can be dislodged if alternative information is presented. The slots themselves may be filled by frames, providing for a recursive representational system. Another source of systemacticity is that frames are related to one another by transformations (e.g., the transformation of moving from one viewpoint in a rom to another). Some transformtions will result in changes in the slot-fillers, while others will retain the same values. Minsky proposed that when a person encounters a situation, what the person tries to do is to match the information about the situation to a frame in a stored frame system; once a poossible frame is proposed, it generates expectations that guide further search for information. If such a search produces intormation inconsistent with the frame, the a new proposal for a frame must be advanced. Minsky linked his notion of frame to schemata, which figured in Bartlett's (1932) account of memory, and to paradigms which figured in Thomas Kuhn's account of normal scinece. (61)
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last revised:
September 3, 2007
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