A frame-based approach to implicature in the analysis of free-trade discourse

• Main Author: Sarazin, Paul
• Other Authors: Chilton, Paul
• Published: Lancaster University 2015
• Subjects: 382
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.730633

This thesis concerns the analysis of implicature in discourse, with the aim of furthering the investigation of the role of implicature in the discursive formation of world views. Two small corpora of AU and EU speeches on the topic of free-trade agreements are used to exemplify the theory and methodology. From a theoretical point of view, I draw on work on context configuration and inferencing in Cognitive Pragmatics, as well as on work concerning syntactic and semantic frames in Cognitive Linguistics. In this approach clauses are parsed, following FrameNet, according to a target and a frame as a syntactic governor, in addition to semantic frames in the sense of an organisation of knowledge in the mind. The aim is first to find out how the two text producers frame the proposed free-trade contract, as well as the institutions involved, including themselves and the WTO. Using these results, we secondly examine how they discursively construct their respective knowledge on free trade, and with those slot-filler relations in mind, we consider, thirdly, which implicatures each discursive participant may be intending to generate about their view of the proposed free-trade contracts. The findings from the overall analysis show an almost entirely overlapping set of semantic frames, e.g. FREE TRADE, FREE-TRADE CONTRACT, AID and EU, found in both the AU and EU corpora. The corresponding slots for the frames, however, are filled very differently by the respective discursive participants. This, in turn, means that the resulting implicatures all contrast, so that essentially the ‘take- home’ message of the AU and EU speeches is ‘don’t sign the free-trade contract!’ and 'sign...!' respectively.