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Texte intégral
Journal article

Contextual frames and their argumentative implications : a case study in media argumentation

  • Greco Morasso, Sara Istituto di argomentazione, linguistica e semiotica (IALS), Facoltà di scienze della comunicazione, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
    2012
Published in:
  • Discourse studies. - Sage. - 2012, vol. 14, no. 2, p. 197-216
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
English 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.
Language
  • English
Classification
Information, communication and media sciences
License
License undefined
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1318588
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