Changes of Frames in Institutional Talk

Abstract

The paper starts from the concepts of frame and participants’ alignment as defined by Goffman (1986) and Tannen (1993) and uses them in the analysis of a telephone conference in a multinational company where English is the lingua franca. The purpose of the analysis is to identify the frame changes and the linguistic devices that mark them as well as the possible misunderstandings that such changes can cause for participants.