| Debate plays an important part in human history as well as in language study. The research of debate, however, lags behind that of many other subjects. No matter from the angle of research scale or the achievements from these researches, debate study is relatively undeveloped. The problems of debate research mainly are: first, the simple study of philosophy; second, lacking of interdisciplinary study. Due to its significance in both social life and its under-development in research, the author believes that the research would be significant in both theoretical development and application.Based on frame theory, this research analyzes the building and shifting of frames in English debate. The theoretical foundation of this paper is frame theory. The Lakoff's research about American politics provides a research framework for this paper. All the data analyzed in the paper are from the database of International Debate Education Association. The analysis is carried on under Fillmore's observation of semantic patterns. Based on the above literature, this paper develops a research about the application of frame theory in English debate.Through the analysis, the author aims to further develop the current studies home and abroad, as well as to lay some certain ground work for future development. In the analysis, the author categorizes the semantic frames and points out the different roles the categories may play, the functions of different semantic frames, the building and motivating of frames and principles for the application of semantic frames.The conclusion of the research is designed to help debaters in English debate to improve their debate skills so as to gain greater chances to win a debate. Moreover, the research may offer some implication for cross-disciplinary study of English debate. In this sense, the author hopes the research may help debate researchers notice the potential guidance for debate from the fruitful researches in other fields, such as linguistics. On the other hand, the research includes debate in the research field of linguistics, which is rarely seen in linguistic study. |
