Semantic fields and frames: Historical explorations of the interface between language, action, and cognition

Abstract

The concept of ‘semantic field’, like the concept of ‘semantic frame’, opened up new domains of semantic research, first in Germany in the 1930s and then in the United States in the 1970s. Both concepts brought about ‘revolutions’ in semantics, and provided semanticists with new tools for the study of semantic change and semantic structure. Although there have been several historical accounts of the development of field semantics, there exists no detailed study linking and comparing the development of field and frame semantics. In this article we shall reconstruct the contexts in which the concepts of ‘field’ and ‘frame’ appeared for the first time and highlight the similarities as well as the differences between the semantic theories built on them. One of the main differences between the older and the modern traditions is that the latter no longer study how lexical fields carve up a relatively amorphous conceptual mass, as most older traditions had done, but how lexical fields are conceptually and pragmatically ‘framed’ by or grounded in our bodily, social and cultural experiences and practices. In doing so they establish forgotten links with certain communicational and functional conceptions of semantic fields developed in the past.