Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

119This kind of understanding by the language-user is only possible because somewords from that sentence evoke certain frames against which they are understood (wecan also say that the speaker uses those words to invoke frames):1. dad: the speaker is not a grown-up2. my dad: the speaker is not talking to a member of his own household3. morning: day as working day as opposed to calendar day4. on a bus: a vehicle in service (and not „in a bus‟)5. wasted: “time is precious”Finally, hearing sentence [5] the reader may very well interpret the statement asa PhD Thesis frame. For those familiar with the elaboration of a doctoral thesis and thisthesis in particular, the statement evokes a whole set of information that is part of theinterpreter‘s background knowledge on what a PhD thesis involves, e.g. the fact that athesis is composed of chapters, one or two supervisors and a student, deadlines.These examples illustrate that Frame Semantics ―makes the assumption thatthere is always some background knowledge relative to which a word does someprofiling/highlighting, and relative to which it is defined‖ (Gawron 2008: 8). Take theword Tuesday from sentence [3]. We know that we live in a world where cycliccalendars divide time into repeating intervals, i.e. years are divided into months, whichare divided into weeks which are divided into days, which have cyclic names. Eachweek has a Sunday, a Monday, a Tuesday, and so on. As Fillmore (1985) explains,defining Tuesday entails defining the notion of cyclic calendar. The concept of cycliccalendar provides the background frame for lexical units such as week, month,Saturday, etc. In the case of Tuesday, we can say that this lexical unit evokes the frameCalendric_unit.