Corpus Linguistics applied to Frame Semantics

investigating pro-choice conceptualizations in SUG no. 15/2014’s debate

Abstract

This article relates to a Ph.D. thesis which aimed at comprehending, throughout the identification of different semantic frame instantiations, the meaning networks that (re)frame women’s human and reproductive rights in the context of the public hearings that discussed the SUG no. 15/2014 – such a proposal intended to regulate abortion in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, in Brazil (SANTOS, 2020). Specifically, the text presents some analytical developments made available by the integration of the qualitative analysis tool NVivo to the Sketch Engine tool, considering the need of a corpus segmentation into thematic units for a later processing of these data in a concordancer. In order to discuss this process, the article describes the identification of frames within the discourse of the ones that advocate for the SUG proposal, whose lexical choices reflect the conceptualization of abortion as a public heath matter, as well as a social justice one. Concerning the results, the article emphasizes that the integrated usage of different tools devoted to empirical analysis allows a corpus-based description that reveals the multifaceted dimension of a semantic frame – a socio-cognitive structure that is built in the interconnections between lexicon, discourse and cognition.