On the Concepts of Frame and Reframing in the Language System (An Attempt of Contrastive Analysis)

Abstract

The concepts of frame and reframing became the focus of researchers’ attention in social sciences in the 1970s. Within the context of linguistics, the concept of frame was referred to as a component of the mental lexicon. In this paper an attempt has been made to apply the concepts of frame and reframing to the analysis of the structural and semantic transformations in the language system with reference to the theoretical framework of onomasiology, which was developed in Russian linguistics. The aim of the study was defined as the analysis of the situation in reality, named as “Natural Disaster → Storm”, and its verbalization models in modern Russian and Turkish. Topic-related open access news archives of Russian and Turkish news agencies as well as Russian and Turkish National Corpora were used for defining models in the language pair. Descriptive linguistics and contrastive approach, which seek to describe the differences and similarities between two languages, were used for the model analysis in the framework of this study. Russian and Turkish naming patterns for the frame of “Natural Disaster → Storm” were described and analyzed. Due to the scope of the article, the frame analysis was limited to the categories of “Inception” and “Realization”. Reframing was described through the example of the perspective shift “Storm ↔ Space”. The contrastive study revealed both the differences and similarities in the naming patterns and reframing models in the language pair. The evidence from this study suggests that including the contrastive frame analysis in the process of the foreign language teaching and translation training is important for the development of the students’ predictability as well as their semantic awareness towards both the second language and the mother tongue. The paper suggests that future research should further explore the frames and reframing models in Turkish-Russian language pair and the findings should be used in the process of teaching foreign language and translation training.