Linguistic Frames Research Articles

A Contextual Analysis on Social Media Updates

This qualitative, corpus-based, and contextual analysis approach aimed to give and provide the linguistic features and functions in male and female social media updates. The purpose of this study was to help the students assess the posts of social media users and to find out if there are linguistic features or linguistic functions found in their social media updates. In this study, there were a total of sixty-two (62) corpora taken from both male and female social media updates that are categorized into five linguistic features, including the intensifiers, tag questions, questions on declarations, lexical hedges, empty adjectives and six linguistic functions including the referential function, poetic function, emotive function, conative function, phatic function and metalingual function. Results revealed that in social media updates of males and females, linguistic features and functions are found by contextualizing their posts in the adopted linguistic frame of analysis. Also, it helps future English students know the linguistic features and linguistic functions as their basis, using other platforms for them to be responsible for posting online. It serves as their point of reference for the students and English instructors to unearth the linguistic aspect in social media, particularly in males and females.

Euphemism as a powerful framing device that influences moral judgments and punitive responses after wrongdoing.

Euphemism-that is, softening words or phrases substituted for more direct language-has become pervasive in our everyday personal and professional lives. Leveraging theory and research on construal and framing effects, we conceptualize euphemism as a linguistic framing device that influences how observers construe situations and the people, groups, objects, and events within them. We then experimentally investigate the effects of euphemism as a linguistic framing device on third-party judgments about moral transgressions (i.e., bribery, fraud). Across studies (total N = 3,081) we find consistent evidence that employing euphemistic labels (relative to their noneuphemistic analogs) reduces the perceived severity of moral transgressions and, as a result, also reduces third-party motivations to punish transgressors. Overt experimental manipulations to reconstrue euphemistic labels into their noneuphemistic forms reduced, but did not entirely eliminate, the effects on moral severity and punishment judgments. Participants did not sufficiently adjust their judgments. These findings underscore the power of simple linguistic manipulations in influencing public opinion, and they have important implications for the possibility of creating a more just and fair society. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Aspectual Processing Shifts Visual Event Apprehension

AbstractWhat is the relationship between language and event cognition? Past work has suggested that linguistic/aspectual distinctions encoding the internal temporal profile of events map onto nonlinguistic event representations. Here, we use a novel visual detection task to directly test the hypothesis that processing telic versus atelic sentences (e.g., “Ebony folded a napkin in 10 seconds” vs. “Ebony did some folding for 10 seconds”) can influence whether the very same visual event is processed as containing distinct temporal stages including a well‐defined endpoint or lacking such structure, respectively. In two experiments, we show that processing (a)telicity in language shifts how people later construe the temporal structure of identical visual stimuli. We conclude that event construals are malleable representations that can align with the linguistic framing of events.

Framing victimhood, making war: A linguistic historicizing of secessionist discourses

Abstract As separatist yearnings resurge and gain traction in Nigeria, the agency of language and digitality in spreading dissident discourses has come under scrutiny. In this study, I investigate the linguistic-historical dimension of the Biafran movements, exploring the rhetorical frames by which the actors curate ethnic victimhood and sustain the secessionist struggle. Drawing on a corpus of memoiristic narrative of the Biafra war and digitally mediated discourses from a new Biafran movement – Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), I identify and discuss the central topoi of warspeak in both narratives across space and time. In this context, the notions of linguistic framing and atrocity propaganda are fruitfully integrated to analyse the range of rhetorical strategies for incentivizing the struggle and for animating its social capital. While both narratives draw on shared belongings, historical precedents, cultural frameworks, and atrocity stories for incitement, they vary in style and audience. I attribute the shifts to changes in actors’ demographics, discursive contexts, and Nigeria’s ethnopolitical cartographies.

Customer Profitability Analysis in decision-making-The roles of customer characteristics, cost structures, and strategizing.

This study investigates the interplay between strategic goals and calculative practices, specifically Customer Profitability Analysis (CPA). Drawing on practice-based theories, the research aims to understand how managers strategize with CPA, including the balancing of financial and strategic objectives and the interplay of institutionalized practices with individual practitioners' actions. The study uses a qualitative, revelatory, and exploratory case study approach at the sub-organizational level in a manufacturing company. The researchers compare CPA practices across six departments, guided by a phenomenological research design. Data collection methods include informal conversations, qualitative observations, written documentation, numerical evidence from the accounting system, and interviews. The study offers four novel findings to the field. First, it highlights how managers employ procedural and interactive strategizing to reframe CPA practices. The sophistication of CPA practices increases with unevenly distributed customer volume, high customer-specific, controllable overhead, customer-to-customer interaction, and service complexity. Conversely, the sophistication of cost-focused CPA practices tends to decrease with diverse strategic goals. Additionally, CPA become more effective through the utilization of non-financial information, employee empowerment, localization, and strategic alignment. Second, CPA can be adapted through integrative strategizing where managers avoid using it as a financial benchmark for strategic initiatives. Third, accountants actively seek intermediary roles to incorporate arguments from strategy and marketing to balance strategic objectives-contrary to their portrayal as myopic guardians of profitability. Fourth, the localization of CPA practices to front-line employees compensates for a lack of sophisticated CPA practices. Future research should, investigate the adaptation of calculative practices in different cultures, and industries. Exploring additional contextual factors such as uncertainty, management characteristics, and linguistic framing of practices would be beneficial. Examining the interactions in utilizing CPA practices between front-line staff and customers would shed light on their effectiveness. Lastly, investigating the role of consultants in diffusing such practices would offer valuable perspectives.

How language shapes anti-fat bias: comparing the effects of disease and fat-rights framing

Being fat is often described as a “disease”—a form of linguistic framing that may exacerbate bias against fat people rather than reduce it as intended. Framing fatness as a matter of equal treatment and respect (“fat rights”) may be more effective for bias reduction. In a preregistered experiment (N = 401), we directly compared the effects of disease and fat-rights framing on attitudes toward fat people. Participants read a news article that affirmed or negated (a) the claim that fatness is a disease and (b) the unacceptability of weight discrimination, and then expressed their attitudes toward fat people. Disease-affirming articles yielded more negative attitudes than disease-negating articles, but only for participants who explicitly recognized that the article influenced their attitudes. For these participants, fat-rights framing also had a significant impact: those who read a disease-affirming article expressed less negative attitudes toward fat people when the article also affirmed rather than negated fat rights. These results show that language can shift public opinion about fatness when people are aware of its persuasive power. Our findings support a social-pragmatic account of linguistic framing and have implications for real-world anti-bias efforts.

Strategies of Blaming on Social Media: An Experimental Study of Linguistic Framing and Retweetability

This article introduces an original theoretical model for understanding how the linguistic framing of political protest messages influences how blame spreads in social media. Our model of blame retweetability posits that the way in which the basis and focus of blame are linguistically construed affects people’s perception of the strength of criticism in the message and its likelihood to be reposted. Two online experiments provide empirical support for the model. We find that attacks on a person’s character are perceived as more critical than blaming focused on the negative outcomes of their actions, and that negative judgements of social sanction have a greater impact than those of social esteem. The study also uncovers a “retweetability paradox”—in contrast to earlier studies, we find that blame messages that are perceived as more critical are not more likely to be reposted.

Automated multimodal sensemaking: Ontology-based integration of linguistic frames and visual data

Frame evocation from visual data is an essential process for multimodal sensemaking, due to the multimodal abstraction provided by frame semantics. However, there is a scarcity of data-driven approaches and tools to automate it. We propose a novel approach for explainable automated multimodal sensemaking by linking linguistic frames to their physical visual occurrences, using ontology-based knowledge engineering techniques. We pair the evocation of linguistic frames from text to visual data as “framal visual manifestations”. We present a deep ontological analysis of the implicit data model of the Visual Genome image dataset, and its formalization in the novel Visual Sense Ontology (VSO). To enhance the multimodal data from this dataset, we introduce a framal knowledge expansion pipeline that extracts and connects linguistic frames – including values and emotions – to images, using multiple linguistic resources for disambiguation. It then introduces the Visual Sense Knowledge Graph (VSKG), a novel resource. VSKG is a queryable knowledge graph that enhances the accessibility and comprehensibility of Visual Genome’s multimodal data, based on SPARQL queries. VSKG includes frame visual evocation data, enabling more advanced forms of explicit reasoning, analysis and sensemaking. Our work represents a significant advancement in the automation of frame evocation and multimodal sense-making, performed in a fully interpretable and transparent way, with potential applications in various fields, including the fields of knowledge representation, computer vision, and natural language processing.

Ideology and cognitive stereotypes in media representation of the Russia–Ukraine conflict

This study investigates the representation of the Russia–Ukraine conflict by two state-owned Russian news media and two state-owned Ukrainian news media, namely Izvestia, Russia Today, Ukrinform and Dzerkalo Tyzhnia. The aim of this investigation is to determine the ideologies embedded in the news reports and discourse structures, and strategies deployed in portraying the conflict actors and their actions. Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (see Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach, 1998; New(s) racism: A discourse analytical approach, 2000; and Politics, ideology, and discourse, 2006) and Martin and White’s Appraisal Framework of attitude and graduation (see The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, 2005) served as the theoretical frameworks. Using Critical Discourse Analysis as the analytical framework, the study examines how attitudinal and evaluative language use are employed to enact ideologies and to portray biased presentations of conflict actors. The findings reveal that the media reports of the Russia–Ukraine conflict are laden with militarism and nationalism. Discourse structures and strategies of emotive verbs, evaluative adjectives, positive self-presentation, negative other-presentation, national self-glorification, actor description, comparison and number games are powerful tools for enacting ideologies. The media representation of the Russia–Ukraine conflict lacked conflict resolution embedded linguistic frames and is rather distorted, stereotypic and conflict-inciting.

A computational text analysis investigation of the relation between personal and linguistic agency

Previous psycholinguistic findings showed that linguistic framing – such as the use of passive voice - influences the level of agency attributed to other people. To investigate whether passive voice use relates to people’s personal sense of agency, we conducted three studies in which we analyzed existing experimental and observational data. In Study 1 (N = 835) we show that sense of personal agency, operationalized between participants as recalling instances of having more or less power over others, affects the use of agentive language. In Study 2 (N = 2.7 M) we show that increased personal agency (operationalized as one’s social media followership) is associated with more agentive language. In Study 3 and its two replications (N = 43,140) we demonstrate using Reddit data that the language of individuals who post on the r/depression subreddit is less agentive. Together, these findings advance our understanding of the nuanced relationship between personal and linguistic agency.

Entrepreneurial framing: How category dynamics shape the effectiveness of linguistic frames

AbstractResearch SummaryHow do new entrepreneurial ventures effectively deploy linguistic frames to attract customer demand? Drawing on framing and categories research, we develop and test theory about how category dynamics shape the effectiveness of two commonly observed frames—social impact framing and innovativeness framing—in the context of prosocial categories. We test our predictions by tracking entrepreneurial ventures in the market category for massive open online courses over the category's first 10 years of existence (2012–2021). Our fixed‐effects models show that higher levels of category salience increase the effectiveness of a social impact framing but decrease the effectiveness of an innovativeness framing; conversely, higher levels of category crowdedness decrease the effectiveness of a social impact framing but increase the effectiveness of an innovativeness framing.Managerial SummaryThis research explores how startups can strategically frame themselves to attract customers. We specifically compare the effectiveness of a “social impact framing” (emphasizing the startup's benefits to society) versus an “innovativeness framing” (emphasizing innovativeness) under different market conditions. Our longitudinal study finds that startups benefit most from a social impact framing when their market attracts a lot of attention or has low competition. While an innovativeness framing can backfire under such conditions, it effectively helps to attract customers in a market that receives little attention or exhibits fierce competition. Entrepreneurs and managers can leverage our insights to more effectively tailor their framing strategies to their market environment and ultimately gain more customer traction.

Individuals versus ensembles and "each" versus "every": linguistic framing affects performance in a change detection task

Though each and every are both distributive universal quantifiers, a common theme in linguistic and psycholinguistic investigations into them has been that each is somehow more individualistic than every. We offer a novel explanation for this generalization: each has a first-order meaning which serves as an internalized instruction to cognition to build a thought that calls for representing the (restricted) domain as a series of individuals; by contrast, every has a second-order meaning which serves as an instruction to build a thought that calls for grouping the domain. In support of this view, we show that these distinct meanings invite the use of distinct verification strategies, using a novel paradigm. In two experiments, participants who had been asked to verify sentences like each/every circle is green were subsequently given a change detection task. Those who evaluated each-sentences were better able to detect the change, suggesting they encoded the individual circles' colors to a greater degree. Taken together with past work demonstrating that participants recall group properties after evaluating sentences with every better than after evaluating sentences with each, these results support the hypothesis that each and every call for treating the individuals that constitute their domain differently: as independent individuals (each) or as members of an ensemble collection (every). We situate our findings within a conception of linguistic meanings as instructions for thought building, on which the format of the resulting thought has consequences for how meanings interface with non-linguistic cognition.

“This study is not without its limitations”: Acknowledging limitations and recommending future research in applied linguistics research articles

Acknowledging limitations and making recommendations for future research are often presented in thesis handbooks and rubrics as obligatory moves that demonstrate an author's critical self-evaluation and authority. Published research articles (RAs), however, reflect nuanced variation that challenges this interpretation. Based on two specialized corpora of 100 quantitative and 100 qualitative RAs from four applied linguistics journals, this mixed methods study combines genre analysis, which highlighted the relative prominence of these moves across methodological approaches and journals, and p-frame analysis, which generated a list of linguistic frames with one or more variable slots (e.g., it is important to * (note/mention/realize)) that emphasize flexibility within formulaic language structures. The results indicate that both moves are quasi-obligatory but vary considerably across methodologies and journals. EAP instructors might use genre analysis to evaluate rhetorical moves and steps together with students and to discuss ways to incorporate variety in academic writing using the list of p-frames identified in this study.

The Pandemic and Media Discourse: Linguistic Framing of Covid-19 in Egyptian Advertisements

<em>Since the outbreak of Covid-19 in late 2019, media discourse worldwide has attempted to frame the pandemic as an invisible enemy everyone needs to fight. The total lockdown that took place due to the pandemic has also had an impact on media discourse in its different forms, such as television commercials. Business companies have tried to address the theme of the pandemic and the urgency to abide by the lockdown and social distancing in their advertisements produced during the period of 2019-2020. This paper aimed to examine selected Egyptian commercials, either on television or YouTube, to analyze how they tackled the pandemic. Eight Egyptian commercials were analyzed, focusing on how the pandemic was framed verbally and visually. Analysis was carried out on two levels. The first level was concerned with examining the ideas/themes that were promoted in the selected commercials that would shape how the audience would regard the pandemic. The second level investigated how these themes were represented verbally and visually by analyzing the linguistic as well as the visual layout used in the selected commercials. Significant results showed that the pandemic was linguistically framed in metaphors related to war, enemy, family, and Lockdown/Stay Home. These linguistic frames were also supported by the visual representation that highlighted the themes of social distancing and the lockdown.</em>

For whom do boundaries become restrictions? The role of political orientation.

While the global pandemic highlighted the importance of adhering to boundaries (e.g., social distancing rules), compliance with these boundary-imposing measures has been politically divided. This research proposes one reason that may underlie the observed ideological asymmetries toward COVID-19 prevention measures and boundaries in general: Conservatives and liberals may fundamentally differ in how they construe boundaries. Supporting this prediction, Studies 1a-1d and two follow-up studies (n = 3,231; Studies 1a-1c and follow-up studies: Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific users, Study 1d: U.S. students) demonstrate that identifying with political conservatism (vs. liberalism) increases the likelihood to construe boundaries as restrictions. We further show that, due to conservatives' greater preference for order, structure-related words carry a more positive connotation among conservatives versus liberals (Study 2: n = 744; MTurk users). Capitalizing on this finding, we demonstrate that linguistic framing that highlights the structure-providing function of a boundary (e.g., a social distancing sign can "structure" customer flow in a restaurant) can reduce the salience of its usual restrictive aspect and hence effectively improve conservatives' attitudes toward the boundaries (Study 3: n = 740; MTurk users). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Preregistered direct replication of the linguistic frame effect on perceived blame and financial liability

Preregistered direct replication of the linguistic frame effect on perceived blame and financial liability

“It's not Paul, it's a robot”: The impact of linguistic framing and the evolution of trust and distrust in a collaborative robot during a human-robot interaction

An appropriate level of human-robot trust is widely acknowledged as a crucial factor for successful human-robot interaction (HRI). Previous research has addressed anthropomorphic design but mostly neglected linguistic framing as a means to influence trust by altering the perceived human-likeness of a robot. Similarly, time-dependant patterns of trust and distrust during an HRI have rarely been investigated, hindering the development of a coherent theoretical framework on framing effects, their formation conditions, and their relation to trust and distrust evolution in the HRI context. A previous online study suggested that linguistic framing modulates inexperienced factory workers’ trust in a collaborative robot at the workplace. This article presents a follow-up study with a sample of students and an realistic HRI setting. Despite using similar framing stimuli, the study failed to replicate significant framing effects on trust, suggesting their context-sensitivity and dependence on individual characteristics of the recipients of the framing. Additionally, a significant increase in trust and decrease in distrust during the HRI highlights the need for time-dependant considerations. The results call for a more fine-grained investigation of linguistic framing effects as well as of trust and distrust evolution in order to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework applicable to the HRI context.

Singin’ in the Night

Abstract Starting from present-day German Nachtigall ‘nightingale’, which shows an uncommon and unexpected i-linker, this article provides a morphological analysis of the word and its cognates. Through the frame of historical linguistics, and in particular the historical phonology and morphology of Proto-Germanic, it can be shown that Nachtigall and its Germanic cognates witness a relic word-formation that can be traced back to a delocatival compound in Proto-Indo-European. Comparative evidence allows for just such an etymology within poetic phraseology as well.

Deplorable by proxy: Sartorial semiosis and the rendering of an underclass

In 2016, Donald Trump’s slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) – often displayed on a red cap – prompted myriad interpretations and reactions regarding the message itself and the hat it was displayed upon. Despite the hat’s polysemy, there has been no shortage of institutional attempts to codify the hat and, by extension, the wearers of the hat as racist or otherwise ‘deplorable’ (). By tracing the functional lineage of the MAGA hat alongside a case study of the 2019 Covington Catholic incident, this article uses media discourse analysis to investigate dress as a factional sociopolitical player while interrogating how cultural institutions contribute to social meaning-making, which in turn can leverage dress’s power and unduly malign constituent wearers. Employing theories of sartorial embodiment, the MAGA hat’s enthymematic reading and a critical linguistic frame, this article critiques the pathology of marginal myopia and locates how pejorative ascriptions by proxy of the MAGA hat render Trumpian conservatives, primarily of the White male ilk, as marginal subjects.

Win the next war vs innovate or die: framing the digital transformation across the Taiwanese sectors

PurposeThis paper examines the framing of digital transformation. The research questions are specified as follows: what are the different types of framing strategies in response to digital transformation? How do the strategies differ across organizations? Theoretically, the authors draw on the framing perspective to emphasize the use of linguistic frames in shaping innovation and change processes. Empirically, the authors choose to study the Taiwanese sectors, including publicly governed entities, traditional private business or technology-based ventures.Design/methodology/approachThe authors’ approach combines topic modeling and qualitative analysis. Using data collected from newspaper and magazine articles, the authors employ topic modeling to generate a set of distinctive framings that Taiwanese actors typically adopt to motivate and justify their digital move. The authors also conduct personal interviews to qualitatively complement the authors’ topic modeling analysis and to identify the rationale behind the linguistic framings and the strategic differences brought about by the various organizations.FindingsThe authors identify five topics that the Taiwanese actors commonly used in the framing of digital transformation. These topics or frames are labeled as cross-domain coordination, market demand, intelligent technology, global trend and competition and digital innovation. The practical use of the framings is contingent on organizational characteristics. Furthermore, the authors show how the framings can be classified as either positive framing (e.g. winning the next war) or negative framing (e.g. innovate or die), generally applicable to organizations around the world struggling to cope with digital disruption.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors’ study has two research implications. First, the authors extend the appreciation of the digital transformation from the usual concern with technological and business model innovations to linguistic or framing practices. Second, the authors enrich the framing analysis by emphasizing a practice or contingency perspective based on sector difference. The findings are subject to the limitations of the choice of only established and reputable media outlets, the diatextual reading and filtering of useful articles for topic modeling analysis and the use of world frequency to account for frame significance.Practical implicationsThe authors shift actors' attention from improving technical efficiency to acquiring linguistic resources in the pursuit of digitalization. For example, framing the digital transformation in terms of creating a market orientation calls for not only real consumer power but also strategic discursive competence that enables the move to change. The findings also point out that practitioners can enlarge the scope of their agency rather than being trapped in the habituated routine of practices. Despite social embeddedness, organizations are more often widely connected and built enough to call for more of the cognitive frames to appeal to heterogeneous stakeholders.Originality/valueThe authors study contributes to the literature by developing a linguistic or socio-cognitive view of digital transformation strategy that is capable of expanding organizational attention toward change and innovation. The authors explore menus of strategic frames employed by actors in response to digital transformation. We also address the application of a machine-learning tool such as topic modeling to explore the socio-cognitive dimensions of digital transformation. Furthermore, the analysis leads us to identify the outcomes or effects – either positive or negative – that move beyond the particular Taiwanese case to explain the framing of digital transformation in general.