Describing Travel in Terms of Scripts and Event-Frames

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, LMU Munich (Anglistik), course: Hauptseminar Categorization, Gestalts and Frames in Linguistic Analysis , language: English, abstract: The paper deals with the linguistic phenomenons of scripts and frames and their influnece on our daily life. The focus lies with the well known Restaurant Script and the Travel Frame. Intr. In the early 70s the US linguist Charles J. Fillmore introduced the notion of frame. The aim was 'to widen the scope of lexical and grammatical analysis' (Ungerer & Schmid 2006:207) The initial interpretation of the term, however soon change into a cognitive way. In 1992 Fillmore talks about frames as 'cognitive structure [...] knowledge of which is presupposed for the concepts encoded by words.' (Ungerer & Schmid 2006:210) We can state that the notion of frames shifted from being a linguistic construct towards a cognitive one. But not only in linguistics has the frame notion been used, but also in terms of artificial intelligence, namely computer, which have become part of our daily lives and irreplaceable just as language itself. Concl. In total we can say that the notion of frame laid the foundation for scripts and event-frames. Both contributed to improve the understanding of the way people hear, speak and think. Scripts were developed or introduced to 'account for knowledge structures that represent larger sequences of events by casual chains.' (Ungerer & Schmid 2006: 217) Furthermore are script a necessity for computer scientists to feed computers with information in order to create a kind of artificial intelligence. Without these structures and information of standard situations and the behavior concerning it, computers would not be able to process the information given which could be seen on the example of the definite article in the first little story about football. Especially examples like the Restaurant Script can be used to explain the properties of scripts in general. Event-frames were designed to widen the scope of the linguistic analysis. This means in particular taking into account parts of sentences which before had not been examined like adverbials or even expressions that are not contained in the written form. Furthermore are event-frames interesting in terms of language acquisition and use in different languages, which could be seen with the story 'Frog, where are you?' Here it becomes clear that satellite-framed languages like English seem to be more feasible when it comes to describing motion as the MANNER is incorporated in the PATH. In the end scripts and event-frames can be labeled as important scientific aspects of cognitive linguistics.