FRAMING ISSUES IN THE SPECIALISED DISCOURSE OF DIPLOMACY. A QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE APPROACH

This study explores the specialized ‘territory’ of diplomacy and, more particularly, it reports results on the cognitive frames used by British foreign ministers to pursue their ideological design. This work adopts both a cognitive and discourse-based perspective on the language of diplomacy assuming that the frames chosen allow speakers to negotiate solidarity with their audience and in so doing they ‘naturalize’ a number of ideological positions. More particularly, I will focus on those cognitive frames which prove to be statistically ‘salient’. Thus, quantitative methods developed in corpus linguistics will be used to support qualitative methods of critical reading of larger bodies of diplomatic-relevant texts.