Contextual frames and their argumentative implications
a case study in media argumentation
Additional information
Authors
Type
Journal Article
Year
2012
Language
English
Abstract
On the basis of a case-study based on the argumentative analysis of news in the press, this paper introduces and discusses strategic manoeuvring with contextual frames. Drawing on the linguistic notion of frame, I introduce the concept of contextual frame to refer to the news context, i.e. the background against which a certain event is presented as a piece of news. I argue that newspapers and journalists make use of contextual frames in the apparently neutral genre of news reporting to propose specific interpretations of the facts at issue, which become the basis for explicit comments and editorials. To show how this works, I analyse a case of newspaper coverage of a complex episode using the pragma-dialectical notion of strategic manoeuvring and the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) to analyse argument schemes. I show that, in the use of contextual frames, there is a prominent relation between presentational devices (the lexical choices which build up the frame) and topical potential; contextual frames provide the implicit material premises (endoxa) which are at the basis of argumentations through which newspapers interpret and comment the news.
Keywords
Discourse, argumentation, news in the press, media, news and comments, Italian newspapers, frames, contextual frames, context, pragma-dialectics, strategic manoeuvring, topical potential, presentational devices, AMT model, Argumentum Model of Topics, argument schemes, loci, endoxa, implicit premises, lexical choices
Journal
Discourse studies
Volume
14
Number ( Month )
2
Pages (or article number)
197-216
Diffusion
License
License undefined
Visibility
Public
Status open access
Green
