FRAME SEMANTICS AND THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE *

The decision to schedule sessions on “formulating the target” for the first day of this conference, based undoubtedly on the simple wisdom that knowing what a thing is like is a prerequisite to asking how it got that way, was probably also made in the hope that the target-formulating contributions might actually lead to some sort of consensus on the nature of language. Scholars inquiring into the origin of language will surely want to agree on at least some of the details of the last scene of the evolutionary scenario they are trying to construct. Unfortunately, the problem of describing this last scene is a notoriously difficult one: making clear the true nature of language is no trivial assignment, as I think everybody here is well aware. As a contribution to a t least a part of the understanding we need, I will present for your consideration a way of talking about one aspect of the process of communicating in a human language, something I will refer to as “framing.” 1 choose this, not because I find it intrinsically more important than the formal structures of messages or meanings, or more important than the many global properties by which, from a more purely comparative perspective, human languages can be shown to differ from other communicating systems; I choose framing because 1 think it is important and because 1 suspect that it might not get mentioned, or that it might not be sufficiently highlighted, in the other papers to be read at this conference. I mean by framing the appeal, in perceiving, thinking, and communicating, to structured ways of interpreting experiences. It is an alternative to the view that concepts or categories are formed through the process of matching sets of perceptual features with, say, words. 1 plan in this paper to justify the frames notion, to give a number of examples, mostly from English, of different kinds of frame structures, to suggest informally and intuitively how the frame concept can figure in the explanation of the communication and comprehension processes, and in the end to offer some hedged speculations on how the study of frames might appear in research on evolution toward language and on the evolution of language.