Commentary: Frames and contexts
| Autor: | John J. Gumperz, Jenny Cook-Gumperz |
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| Rok vydání: | 2022 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA). :283-286 |
| ISSN: | 2406-4238 1018-2101 |
| DOI: | 10.1075/prag.21.2.06coo |
| Popis: | One of the main challenges resulting from the past two decades of shift toward detailed micro-analytic studies of language and interaction has been the awareness of a need to relate microanalysis to wider social-cultural aspects of interactional situations. (Muench and Smelser 1987). The contributors to this volume have tackled head-on the perennial question of the micro-macro link by bringing together a group of papers that cover a global range of cultures and activities. They demonstrate how talk can be constitutive of social activity across a range of situations and explore how interactional accomplishments of participants are realized in varied cultural settings. They go on to demonstrate how reworking the notion of frame into one that is broader than that of context construed, as Levinson puts it, “as a set of propositions taken for granted by the participants,” (2002: 33) may provide a link to the wider cultural features of a situation through the verbal specifics of the interaction, so confronting the gap between what is said and what is actually meant at any particular time and in any particular situation involving talk. In so doing, they highlight the need for a construct that while indexical, in the sense that recognition of a frame will rely on specific features of the activity that only the participants can know, yet will also provide guideposts that enable the present event to be seen as part of set of activities having similar properties. Such a construct goes some way toward solving the issue of how we can bridge detailed micro-studies of face-to-face communication with the socio-historical concerns of linguistic and social communities. Frame as a cognitive construct The concept of Frame emerged in the cognitive revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s (Gardner 1985) as a way of accounting for the cognitive categorization of social events as guides for future behavior. Such descriptive notions as ‘scene’ or ‘script’ were regarded as super-ordinate categories through which individuals could sort and code their physical and verbal activities. Experience stored as knowledge structures, once retrieved, could give access to information essential to judging the risk or effectiveness of any future actions in similar situations (Schank and Abelson 1977). From the perspective of language and cognition the accumulation of these stocks of memories and knowledge relied on individuals’ verbal abilities to activate information essential for the situation at hand. Psycholinguists and some linguists in the 1970’s and 80’s took these ideas further and explored the contribution that specific language structures made to the |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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