Preface

This book stems from an international Colloquium on Frames in Linguistics, Philosophy and Economics held at the University of Bologna in June 2006. It was organised within a FIRB project sponsored by Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR). The conference welcomed approaches from linguistics, Italian studies, cognitive science, computer science, economics, philosophy, and philosophy of science to reflect the current interest in the applications of the frame conception both in humanities and in social sciences. In the contributions contained in the present volume different aspects are discussed from different vantage points, which highlight the alternative and complementary features that characterize the concept of frame . The relations of frames to common sense reasoning, judgment aggregation, decision making, pragmatic arguments, and so on, are investigated and generally assumed to provide the fundamental representation of knowledge in human cognition. The vision of frames as conceptual structures that shape the ways in which individuals enact and interpret their experiences seem to underlie most contributions and approaches. The relevance of linguistic frames and, in Fillmore's words, of frame semantics was widely accepted as well as the envisaging of the merging of cognitive and linguistic traditions relating in frame analysis. The interdisciplinary flavour of the book still highlights the fundamental role of framing in language usage, and emphasis is put on the crucial role played by frames as the basic format of concept formation . Interestingly, it is possible to detect a red thread in the different contributions, and it can be expressed in Fillmore's words: What holds ( . . . ) word groups together is the fact of their being motivated by, founded on, and co-structured with, specific unified frameworks of knowledge or coherent schematization of experience, for which the general word frame can be used (1985:223). In this context, the book was put together to investigate the connections between frames and linguistic descriptions as well as the use of frames in linguistics, in particular in lexical representations and frame-based cognitive semantics. The complexity of frame interpretation is at the origin of a number of research fields, and this volume hosts contributions where different cognitive and linguistic aspects of the frame problem are considered. Cognitive operations, and conceptualization processes are described in their fluid and dynamic principles; fine-grained contrastive semantic analyses are carried out and illustrated; the possibility of (automatically) identifying frame elements through surface corpus data are explored and computational approaches to the problem of lexical access are presented and discussed with particular reference to the Italian lexicon. Finally, the innovative methodological approaches which are brought out by these perspectives are illustrated considering tools and resources made available for the analysis of Italian corpus data and for the study of the contemporary and modern history of the Italian language.