NAMES AS FRAMES IN CURRENT-DAY MEDIA DISCOURSE

Over the past few decades, the media have undergone an unprecedented amount of change, accelerating the conflict between an ongoing information explosion and the pressure to communicate information as efficiently and economically as possible. This has resulted in compressed styles of expression which are less explicit in meaning. The development is paralleled by an increase in the use of names rather than complex noun phrases to describe and evaluate persons, places, physical objects or events in media texts (e.g. Nick Clegg is the British Obama). The aim of the present study is to explore how the choice of names helps recipients build interpretative frames that allow them to make sense of a given message. These `name frames' frequently place a heavy burden on recipients, who need linguistic, encyclopaedic and cultural knowledge to activate a respective frame.