The Forum A Multi-Layered Framework of Framing

Professor Leslie M. Beebe has always been an unfailing source of encouragement, a wealth of knowledge and insight, and a wonderful critic. She has taught me much about pragmatics and sociolinguistics, the foundations of my current interests in the social construction of meaning in interaction. My passion for discourse analysis developed while taking several of Professor Beebe’s courses, in particular Interactional Sociolinguistics, where I was introduced to the notion of framing. From our classroom discussions and readings, I developed a conceptualization of framing that became the underlying framework for my subsequent research and current dissertation work on family discourse and identity construction. Below is an adaptation of the “framework of framing ” from my data collection paper in the Interactional Sociolinguistics class. Framing (Re)defined Based on the notion of framing first proposed by Goffman in 1974 (1997a), and expanded upon by Tannen (1993) and Tannen and Wallat (1993), I propose a multi-layered framework of framing, in which the various facets of a situation can be seen in qualitatively different types of overlapping notions of frames. Goffman uses Bateson’s (1972) term frame to address the question an individual must ask in any social situation: “What is going on here? ” (Goffman, 1997a, p. 153) and define