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If taken from a broad perspective, the very dissertation has been put in the setting of contemporary American politics, with the Democrat and the Republican playing major characters in the picture, the former metaphorically entitled “a nurturant parent” and the latter “a strict father” (Lakoff, 2004: 6 ). Specifically, the analysis is on the basis of two brief public speeches given respectively by the incumbent president of the White House Barack Obama and his predecessor George Bush who has been called the 911 President by American people. Moreover, the speech given by Obama turns out to be a weekly address on the ninth anniversary of 911 attack in 2010, while the other speech addressed to the whole nation dates back to the year of 2001, which was at that time televised live on American Cable News Network.
With respect to its aim, the paper is expected to offer people with a brand-new outlook towards American partisan politics and the frame theory serves as a tool for the analysis of political speeches, which single out words with special implications which fits the context, “structure the meanings of sentences, paragraphs and texts”, and reveal the essential values in accord with party lines (Fillmore, 1982: 111).
This paper justifies itself with the flourishing of the discipline of cognitive linguistics itself. And here comes a quotation on cognitive science from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson as to provide a prerequisite knowledge:
Cognitive science is an area of knowledge within the scope of science that centers round conceptual systems. It has found out, first of all, that any thought in our minds is mostly unconscious, in the light of the fact that it functions beneath the level of cognitive awareness, which denies consciousness and operates so fast that it is hard to be fixed on. And a small part of what actually happens behind conscious awareness in a conversation is: checking or reviewing memories in connection with what has been said, understanding the language, building a structure that fits the sentence taking into account of the numerous amount of grammatical constructions, collecting words and assigning them meanings that fits the context, giving semantic and pragmatic meanings, and framing what is said in terms associated with the content.(1999: 9,10)
Though the notion of frame was originally taken into account in connection within the spectrum of linguistics, it is proved later that a strong linkage presents itself between frames and the discipline of cognitive science. The frames to be discussed in this paper should be approached at the cognitive level, for processing of the words bears a close relation to the function of our brains. Besides, the area of knowledge of frame semantics is to gain a huge share in our discussion, which help further illuminating of lexical and textual semantics.
The methodology adopted in this paper as to define new scenes and frames includes exemplification of frames and scenes with related lexical items, calculation of highly-relevant words’ frequency, and illumination of their implications. The thesis is expected to render an overall view on the varied perceptions towards 911 event held by the Democrats and the Republicans, and different approaches these two camps tend to adopt as to boost national morale, which will be inferred from frames and scenes within texts. And the frame theory serves as a code to hidden information contained in their public statements.
At home, researches on American political speeches are majorly taken from a perspective of metaphoric interpretation. One argument is that metaphor plays a significant role in the construction of meanings, and is seen as a means of conceptualization (曾洁, 杨丽萍, 2014: 33). And another argument pivots around critical metaphoric analysis, and illustrates that metaphor is a means of perceiving and interpreting things (张爽, 2010: 2). And frames are more prone to be applied into the analysis of metaphors of American political discourses (黄晓萌, 2012: 1,2).