A Framing Analysis Of Negation In Political Discourses

Negation is an important linguistic form. In the past, researches on negation in literary texts were mostly conducted from the perspective of semantics and pragmatics. In recent years, scholars begin to explore negation in political discourses from the cognitive perspective.The Framing Theory is the theoretical foundation of the present study. The concept of "frame" was initially put forward by Goffman (1974) and Minsky (1975) in the field of sociology and artificial intelligence respectively. Fillmore (1982) brings "frame" into linguistic researches. Cognitive linguist Lakoff proposes "The Framing Theory", deems that "frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world; every word evokes a frame, which can be an image or other kinds of knowledge; When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame" (Lakoff,2004).This paper takes the full version of American Presidential Debates in 2012 as corpus (the English version contains 53,000 words while the Chinese version contains 70,000 Chinese characters). By exploiting the corpus software AntConc 3.4.1, negations are identified, with 365 (Obama) and 436 times (Romney) respectively. Through framing analysis, the following major findings are yielded:first, both Obama and Romney regard negation as a way of framing—by conveying negative information, they evoke specific frames to achieve "conceptual manipulation" in order to call for listeners’ rejection of specific information. Secondly, the two candidates have both similarities and differences among frames evoked by negations. The "ROAD", "BALANCE", "DISEASE" and "MORAL" frames are shared by Obama and Romney while "FAIRNESS", "GREEDY", "PART/WHOLE" are specific to Obama and "EFFICIENCY", "WAR" and "UP/DOWN" belong to Romney. Thirdly, frames evoked by negation reflect different ideology and moral models of the two parties in America. For Democrats, they are "the big government model" and "the nurturant parent model" while for Republicans, they are "the small government model" and "the strict father model".To sum up, the present study has not only analyzed and explored negation, but also offers a new thinking for studies on political discourses. In addition, taken as the theoretical foundation of this analysis of negation, The Framing Theory has been applied and verified in cognitive linguistics research again.