The Contrastive Analysis Of Framing And Reframing Strategies In First 2016 American Presidential Debate

The political discourse has attracted much attention of linguistics because politics and language are linked intimately.In general,the study of political discourse has gone through three stages:rhetoric,Critical Discourse Analysis,and Cognitive Linguistics.Political debate plays an essential role in the political culture of the United States.The presidential debate is a significant form of political debate.In American presidential election,the televised presidential debate marks the beginning of the climax of the presidential election.Therefore,televised presidential debate occupies a prominent position.At present,most scholars study political debate from the perspectives of Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis.Few scholars use Cognitive Linguistics to study political debate.Therefore,this thesis analyzes the 2016 first American presidential debate from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics.Within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Framing Theory in Cognitive Linguistics,this thesis analyzes the framing and reframing strategies used by Trump and Hillary in first 2016 American presidential debate contrastively with the corpus approach.The corpus is chosen from the first 2016 American presidential debate,and the full transcript contains 16836 words.This thesis attempts to answer three research questions:(1)What framing and reframing strategies does Hillary use during the debate?(2)What framing and reframing strategies does Trump use during the debate?(3)To contrast their framing and reframing strategies and find out whose framing and reframing strategies are more effective.The findings show:(1)The main frames used by Hillary include fairness frame,investment frame,one of you frame,respect frame,and cooperation frame.She reframes four Trump's frames:reframing "a job creator" as "loophole for the wealthy",reframing"driving business out" as "paying their fair share",reframing successful businessperson as dishonest businessperson,and reframing service frame as treaty frame.(2)The main frames used by Trump contain job-leaving frame,debt frame,incompetent governor frame,and law and order frame.He reframes Hillary's disease frame as war frame.(3)Both Hillary's framing strategies and Trump' s framing strategies have their own merits.The number of times Trump repeats his frames is far more than the number of times Hilary does.Repetition is one of the most effective framing strategies.Nevertheless,Hillary's framing strategies are more accordant with the values of her party:Democratic Party.Both Hillary and Trump make the mistake of using opponent's language occasionally.Hillary's reframing strategies are more effective because the number of times she reframes is more than the number of times Trump does.