Naming and Framing

Understanding the Power of Words across Disciplines, Domains, and Modalities

Viktor Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000362848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book offers an innovative, unified theoretical model for better understanding the processes underpinning naming and framing and the power that words exert over human minds.

The volume integrates theoretical paradigms and empirical insights from across a broad array of research disciplines, several of which have not been combined before, and uses this foundation as a point of departure for introducing its four-layered model of distinct but connected levels of analysis. Bringing together insights from cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics together with multimodal perspectives, Smith establishes new cross-disciplinary links, further integrating work from neighbouring fields such as marketing, health communication, and political communication, that indicate paths for future research and implications for communicative ethics.

This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multimodality, communication, semiotics, cognitive psychology, and linguistics, as well as those in related disciplines such as marketing, political communication, and health communication.

1 Naming & Framing at Level 1
Having a Name for It

1.1 Naming Something Is Having It, but Who’s to Decide?

“If you don’t have a name for something, then as far as people are concerned, you don’t have it at all,” states Kevin Tracey in a promotion video for the services of Tracey Communications (Massachusetts, USA).¹ Tracey attributes the point to the semiotician Marshall Blonsky, but it echoes a relatively broad consensus among language theorists the wider implications of which are however eagerly debated as we shall soon see.

Certainly, real-life support for such a claim appears to be available in abundance. It is hard to imagine HIV and AIDS hitting the headlines in the 1980s and becoming the subject of debates, information campaigns, support lines, charity work, and political decision-making, before these phenomena had not only been identified and described, but also unambiguously named (Emke, 2000; Berridge, 1996; Colby & Cook, 1991). The drastic developments presently evolving around the name Covid-19 still remain to be fully comprehended and recorded in these respects. In turn, this is what is now happening with the sequence of events known as Brexit, a term that gave supporters and opponents of such a political decision in the UK a more tangible target for their campaigning than would a formal phrase like “United Kingdom invocation of Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union.” Arguably, the name also came to underpin a less technical conceptualization of the whole matter in the wider British public, leaving essential consequences unattended till later (Smith, 2017; Walsh, 2017).

Another group of examples are what some marketers and product developers term “really new products,” i.e. innovations which require severe conceptual reorganizations in the minds of consumers to be understood and accepted or rejected (Nielsen, Escalas, & Hoeffler, 2018; Charette, Hooker, & Stanton, 2015; Alexander, Lynch, & Wang, 2008; Hoeffler, 2003; Song & Montoya-Weiss, 1998; see also Rogers, 2010 on the acceptance of new social practices and services). A good example are the compact electronic devices that combine the properties of a mobile phone with those of a laptop, a TV set, a camera, a music player, a GPS, and much else (Park & Chen, 2007; for related examples, see Gattol, Sääksjärvi, Gill, & Schoormans, 2016). Agreeing on “a name for it” here became a vital step towards catching consumers’ attention, facilitating their understanding of the innovation, and ultimately increasing demands, as accomplished in this case by the name smartphone (and tablet for larger variants with somewhat different advantages and drawbacks).

1 https://traceycommunications.com/?p=579 (accesses June 2020).

At the same time, new names are not always created for labelling entirely new phenomena. They may also categorize and present things that have been around us all along in a new way. For example, people who qualify as nerds in present-day English (and e.g. in Danish, Swedish, German, and Russian, with some variations of spelling and pronunciation) are likely to have existed and displayed certain distinct personal characteristics even before that name was invented (otherwise, why invent it?). Likewise, (some) men have surely been explaining complicated matters to women in a patronizing fashion, and many of us have experienced the feeling of being hungry and increasingly angry at the same time before these phenomena were labelled mansplaining and hangry in English and the words included in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, 2018). Moreover, whether something qualifies to have a name or not may in itself be subject to debate. For example, the term premenstrual syndrome (PMS) which dates back to the 1930s has still not been accepted as a valid diagnosis for a distinct medical disorder by many physicians and female citizens (Figert, 2017; Rodin, 1992; see Brown, 1995 on other diagnosis names).

As the examples illustrate, some new names hint at what they are supposed to mean by virtue of their composition and/or origin (e.g. mansplaining) while others do not (e.g. nerd), which does, however, not make the latter names less comprehensible. The very fact of “having a name for it” thus makes a tremendous difference which is the key point pursued in this chapter. The additional flavour potentially added by the expression-unit chosen for the purpose will be further explored in Chapter 2 (leading us to naming & framing at Level 2).

At this point, another question imposes itself: Are there no limits to what can potentially be provided with a dedicated name? The question is particularly prominent for general names denoting categories of things such as fake news, nerds, or smartphones in that a number of people must agree on identifying these entities by more or less similar criteria and calling them by the same name to ensure successful communication. The case is somewhat different for proper names in that everyone is, in principle, entitled to name their cat or bicycle whatever they like and others will usually recognize and go along with that decision (for an illustrative, though polemical, discussion of the social interaction involved, see Devitt & Sterelny, 1999: 66–82). An intermediate case is posed by brand names like Apple and single-referent names like Brexit which have certain traits in common with proper names (i.e. the fixed referents), but nevertheless presuppose the existence of a generalized intersubjective content to fulfil their purpose (see e.g. Kaufmann, Loureiro, & Manarioti, 2016; Thomson & Crocker, 2015; Maurya & Mishra, 2012). These specifics will concern us in due course. For now, the overall question is whether everybody can modify the vocabulary of their native language as they see fit, considering that language is a collective construct usually shared by a large body of individuals.

The question echoes a longstanding theoretical debate, or rather two closely connected ones: the opposition between linguistic universalism and linguistic relativism on the one hand, and that between a static and a dynamic understanding of human categorization and its manifestations in language on the other. We will consider them in turn.

1.2 What Language(s) May and Must

According to the universalist view (for some variants and critical discussion, see Pavlenko, 2014; Regier, Kay, Gilbert, & Ivry, 2010; Pinker, 1994; Pinxten, 1976; Fodor, 1975), different languages may well have different lexical and grammatical means for referring to perceived reality, but given that all languages ultimately build upon the same basic cognitive structures, such means can be combined and adapted to express any content required in any language. The opposite view, known as linguistic relativism, ultimately dates back at least to the Bible’s tale of the Tower of Babel (BibleGateway, 2011: 11, 1–9); for more recent formulations, see e.g. Bentsen (2018); Durst-Andersen (2011); Deutscher (2010); von Humboldt, 1999 [1836]; Wierzbicka (1997); Baldinger (1980); Whorf (1956). The basic argument is that the world’s languages not only reflect, but shape and maintain the way their users understand the world so that each language comes to encapsulate a unique worldview that cannot be transposed to any other language in a 1:1 fashion or altered by its speakers by any short-term measures. The state as such is referred to as linguistic relativity.

For many years, the debates centred around fundamental theoretical positions rather than in-depth analyses of larger portions of linguistic data, relying on isolated (and disputed) examples such as Eskimo languages allegedly having more than 100 words for snow (usually relying on Boas, 1911: 25–26, who however only mentions four) or Hopi Indians having no expressions for time (Whorf, 1956: 57). However, during the last 3–4 decades, more systematic investigations targeting a larger number of languages and semantic domains have been conducted, uncovering a number of generalizable typological differences which divide even closely related languages such as the Indo-European. Focus areas include the lexical and/or grammatical means available for referring to space and motion, different types of physical objects, colours, numbers, cultural stereotypes, and others (Koster & Cadierno, 2018; Groh, 2016; Korzen, 2016; Durst-Andersen, 2011; Tse & Altarriba, 2008; Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2000: 23–146; Wierzbicka, 1997; Hardin & Maffi, 1997; Berlin & Kay, 1969).

Moreover, it has been suggested that some of the general trends observed correlate with certain cultural and structural specifics of the societies in which the languages are spoken. This reasoning has been applied to areas as diverse as the divide between common-law and civil-law legal thinking (Legrand, 1997a, b) and the precise understanding of society-bound notions such as freedom and friendship (Wierzbicka, 1997). It has furthermore been assessed on experimental grounds whether language-typological differences influence the performance of the native speakers of different languages on tasks that go beyond expressing a given content through language such as natural-scene perception and recall and categorization of events in film clips or crime accounts (Rojo & Cifuentes-Férez, 2017; Berthele & Stocker, 2016; Malt, Gennari, & Imai, 2010; Papafragou, Massey, & Gleitman, 2002). The results are not unequivocal, but they do seem to provide support for the overall idea in certain respects.

All of this has led some authors to propose a “weak” version of linguistic relativism, arguing that while language structure alone cannot determine people’s worldview in every respect, it may still direct their attention to different aspects of otherwise comparable objects and phenomena, especially when it comes to putting their thoughts into words, i.e. “thinking for speaking” (Slobin, 1996; see also Kone, 2013; Deutscher, 2010; Gumperz & Levinson, 1996). Virtually the same point was anticipated years earlier by Jakobson in the following subtle passage: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey, not in what they may convey” (1959: 236).

To take a simple example: The English word ball corresponds to two words in French, namely balle or ballon, depending on the object’s size. This is in line with the more general observation that the Romance languages (here: French) tend to have a more varied core vocabulary for human artefacts, differentiating them by their immediate visual appearance, whereas the Germanic languages (here: English) tend to operate with fewer basic nouns (word roots) labelling the objects in accordance with their functional properties (e.g. the ability to roll). Another example would be the Danish word kande (≈ ‘jug’) which corresponds to brocca, bricco, caraffa, annaffiatoio, and more in Italian depending on materials and shape (for further examples and discussion, see Korzen, 2006; Herslund & Baron, 2003; Legrand, 1997b: 56–57).

However, such tendencies do not prevent English and French speakers from giving dedicated names to whatever subtypes of (what is in English called) balls they see as sufficiently communicatively and cognitively important, e.g. by creating composite names such as the English tennis ball and basketball (ball) and correspondingly balle de tennis and ballon de basket in French (i.e. secondary lexicalizations based on re-use of the primary lexicalizations available in the language in question, cf. Smith, 2000). Only, the different starting points in terms of relevant head noun mean that the French names come to explicitly stress the difference in size which the English do not.

Certainly, few English speakers would probably need to have that information spelled out for them in the first place. Yet, a risk of miscommunication may nevertheless occur, for instance, if an English native speaker only superficially familiar with French encounters less typical combinations such as ballon de tennis and balle de basket – say, when used ad hoc for referring to an oversized tennis ball suitable as a dog toy and a miniature basketball intended for decoration; see Figure 1.1a and b.

Figure 1.1 Non-typical uses of the French words balle and ballon in composite names denoting non-typical referents in terms of size, as found in e-store product descriptions. (a) The name ballon de tennis referring to an oversized tennis ball in DHGate.com. (b) The name balle de basked referring to a miniature basketball in Home-Créa.

Without having a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Naming & Framing at Level 1: Having a Name for It
• 2 Naming & Framing at Level 2: The Joyce Principle
• 3 Naming & Framing at Level 3: The Juliet Principle
• 4 Naming & Framing at Level 4: The Lexical Toolbox of Issues Management and Its Multimodal Surroundings
• 5 Concluding Remarks
• References
• Index