Naming and Framing: Understanding the Power of Words Across Disciplines, Domains, and Modalities

This book offers an innovative, unified theoretical model for better understanding the processes underpinning naming and framing and the power that words exert over human minds.

The volume integrates theoretical paradigms and empirical insights from across a broad array of research disciplines, several of which have not been combined before, and uses this foundation as a point of departure for introducing its four-layered model of distinct but connected levels of analysis. Bringing together insights from cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics together with multimodal perspectives, Smith establishes new cross-disciplinary links, further integrating work from neighbouring fields such as marketing, health communication, and political communication, that indicate paths for future research and implications for communicative ethics.

This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multimodality, communication, semiotics, cognitive psychology, and linguistics, as well as those in related disciplines such as marketing, political communication, and health communication.

Viktor Smith has a PhD in International Business Communication and is an Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Society, and Communication, Copenhagen Business School. His key research interest is the way in which words in combination with other carriers of communicative content (pictures, colours, symbols, numbers, shapes, flavours, etc.) not only reflect, but shape the world around us, and the way we see it. Over the years, he has pursued and developed this interest both in cross-disciplinary theoretical work and relative to practice-oriented endeavours spanning from the convergence of European legal cultures to the development of best practices for fair consumer communication through product packaging design.