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DIS0010.1177/14614456231155086Discourse StudiesEditorial
Editorial
Discourse Studies
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Frame analysis © The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/14614456231155086
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614456231155086
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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 defin-
ing 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 sen-
tences 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 dis-
course, 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, ana-
lyzed 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 clos-
ing 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 con-
versation analysis.
In 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
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