“Again, Dozens of Refugees Drowned”: A Computational Study of Political Framing Evoked by Presuppositions (2022)

Abstract: Earlier NLP studies on framing in political discourse have focused heavily on shallow classification of issue framing, while framing effect arising from pragmatic cues remains neglected. We put forward this latter type of framing as “pragmatic framing”. To bridge this gap, we take presupposition-triggering adverbs such as ‘again’ as a study case, and quantitatively investigate how different German newspapers use them to covertly evoke different attitudinal subtexts in their report on the event “European Refugee Crisis” (2014-2018). Our study demonstrates the crucial role of presuppositions in framing, and emphasizes the necessity of more attention on pragmatic framing in the research of automated framing detection.

## introduction framing, i.e., intentionally selecting certain aspects of an issue and making them more salient in a communicating text @xcite , is ubiquitous in political discourse. the release of corpora with manual annotation -mostly based on the codebook of issue framing by @xcite -has popularized the task of issue framing classification (see section 2), e.g., classifying whether influx of migrants is presented from the perspective of economy or domestic security. however, the heavy focus on classification accuracy in earlier studies has resulted in very few in-depth investigations of the effects of individual linguistic cues in framing. yet, in a study on framing strategies employed by different german newspapers in the discourse of the "european refugee crisis" foot_0 (2014-2018), we observed from an exploratory reading that iterative adverbs, including erneut 'again', immer wieder 'again and again', and schon wieder 'yet again', can act as subtle but effective cues of framing. consider sentence (1): erneut dutzende flüchtlinge ertrunken 'again dozens of refugees drowned' @xcite iterative adverbs like 'again' in (1) are known as presupposition-triggers in theoretical pragmatics, as they carry presuppositions (see, e.g., @xcite . a presupposition of an utterance is background information that is "taken for granted" by the speaker, i.e., information that is not explicitly uttered but assumed by the speaker to be shared belief of all discourse participants @xcite @xcite . the word 'again' in sentence (1) triggers the presupposition p below, as its usage assumes that all discourse participants already know p. we argue from two aspects that presuppositions and their triggers are crucial devices for framing. first, presuppositions can smuggle additional information into hearers' belief systems: it is well studied in theoretical pragmatics that presuppositions can be accommodated, i.e., in many cases where the presupposition of an utterance conveys information that is new instead of known to its hearers, the hearers will just tacitly admit to this information in order to make sense of the utterance @xcite @xcite . a reader that did not know p above at the time of reading sentence (1) will normally admit to p silently in order to understand the author's usage of 'again'. second, given a certain political context, presuppositions may bring up attitudinal subtextual messages as a concomitant: once p above is in the belief system of the readers of sentence (1) (either because they already knew p before the reading, or because they accommodated p), the attitudinal subtext a below is likely to be evoked in their mind. we use ⇝ to denote the pragmatic relation that p does not logically entail a, but can plausibly give rise to a. concomitant attitudinal subtexts of this kind can covertly bias the hearers' opinion towards the issue and thus give rise to framing effect. ## earlier nlp studies on framing along with the release of large-scale corpora annotated with issue frames (e.g., @xcite , numerous studies have been done on (weakly-)supervised classification of issue framing. the methods used vary from linear classifiers such as in @xcite (naïve bayes) and @xcite (logistic regression), probabilistic soft logic as in @xcite , neural networks such as in @xcite (lstm) and @xcite (rnn), to transformer-based language models such as bert and roberta (e.g., @xcite @xcite . despite the classification accuracy of these proposed models, there still lacks an in-depth drilling down into the effects of individual linguistic components. a few earlier studies have attempted to incorporate features that are motivated by theoretical linguistics: @xcite validated the positive impact of various semantic and pragmatic features (including factive verb, assertive word, entailment and hedging) on the performance of a naïve bayes classifier for frame classification. @xcite investigated the usage of expressions for necessity modality (including should, must, have to and need to) among tweets about mass shooting events, as necessity modality bears the illocutionary force of calling for action or change in the discourse under discussion. @xcite examined the usage of agent-less passive constructions (e.g., using 'he was killed' instead of 'he was killed by police') in the discourse of police violence in view of the fact that such constructions obscure the actor entirely and thus remove blame from the actor. nevertheless, in the last decades theoretical linguistic researchers have uncovered many more pragmatic cues which have fundamental effects on conveying attitudes and steering the discourse development. such cues are highly relevant for framing but remain unstudied, especially because many of them are stop words and prone to be dismissed in nlp practice. these include, but are not limited to, the aforementioned presupposition-triggers like again or too @xcite , focus particles like even or only @xcite , modal particles like indeed @xcite , and conventional implicaturebearing words like luckily or confidentially @xcite . with our case study on iterative adverbs, we aim at bridging this gap between nlp and theoretical linguistics. ## pragmatic framing as a new dimension of framing as described in section 2, earlier nlp studies on framing detection are centered around issue framing, i.e., what aspects of an issue are covered in the discourse. however, our observation on the effect of presupposition-triggers in political discourse suggests that certain subtle pragmatic cues can evoke implicit, second-level subtextual communication, and this phenomenon remain neglected in the research on framing. we argue that such subtextual communication also constitutes a type of framing, as they covertly smuggle extra informa-tion into the discourse besides the information conveyed by the surface form of the text (see section 1). grounded in this observation, we propose the notion of pragmatic framing as a new dimension of framing besides the issue framing. pragmatic framing differs from issue framing in two aspects: 1) locus: issue framing is a content-level phenomenon. it is typically defined as describing what specific perspectives, values or facts of an issue are presented (see, e.g., @xcite @xcite . however, pragmatic framing is a linguisticslevel phenomenon and describes what specific linguistic devices are employed strategically in order to reinforce a certain perspective, value or fact. pragmatic framing is rooted in the usage of finegrained pragmatic cues, and it contributes to the conveyance of issue frames in a rhetorical sense. the notion of pragmatic framing also applies to a wide range of other theoretical linguistic features that trigger very specific types of discursive inferencing, such as those mentioned in section 2. we believe that more attention on in-depth pragmatic devices will be a valuable enrichment of the research on framing, as the particular ways of presenting information are the core of framing, and the usage of subtle linguistic devices is in turn an essential part of information presentation. ## experiment our study focuses on the usage of iterative adverbs in political discourse as a case of pragmatic framing, and aims at examining whether iterative adverbs give rise to different attitudinal subtexts via presuppositions in different newspapers. the data and experimental setup are described below. ## results and discussion bild the largest cluster (#2) of bild indicates the salience of violence issues among the iteradv-s in bild, as shown by keywords like 'isis', 'aggressive' (german: aggressiv), 'violence' (gewalt) and 'riot' (randalieren). we also found out that iteradv-s which contain the keywords 'initial reception center' (erstaufnahmeeinrichtung) and 'refugee camp' (flüchtlingsunterkunft) are often about violent incidents in refugee camps. this salience of violence issues is furthermore reflected by several keywords in cluster #3 including 'incident' (zwischenfall), 'attack' (übergriff ) and 'perpetrate' (verüben). example (4) depicts the typical effect of iterative adverbs in violence-related sentences: they evoke a negative subtext that refugees are a persistent threat of the domestic security. faz keywords in the largest cluster (#3) of faz show a mixed focus on both the security situation at the mediterranean route, e.g., 'greece' (griechenland), 'human trafficker' (schlepper) and 'smuggler' (schmuggler), as well as on violence issues, e.g., 'foreigner' (ausländer, often used in reports on attacks against foreigners), 'police' (polizei), and 'violence' (gewalt). however, while two of three clusters in bild address violence and security issues (#2 and #3), two of three clusters in faz (#1 and #2) show a clear focus on asylum policies. this is reflected by policy-specific words like 'right of asylum' (asylrecht, #1), names of political actors like 'prime minister' (ministerpräsident, #2), as well as words related to political negotiations like 'reproach' (vorwerfen, #1) and 'conversation' (gespräch #2). example (5) depicts the typical effect of iterative adverbs in sentences containing these keywords: a closer check indicates that iterative adverbs there often evoke the subtext that the execution of refugee policies is hard (and sometimes rendered as inefficient) because of repeating conflicts of interest between parties or countries. ## conclusion grounded in established pragmatics theory, we argued for the importance of presuppositions in framing, and put forward the notion of pragmatic framing. this was validated by our computational study on the case of iterative adverbs. given the sparsity of the iterative adverbs, such pragmatic framing would be difficult to detect with many of the (weakly-)supervised classification approaches pursued in earlier studies, but we showed that it can be uncovered via consciously combining deep linguistic knowledge with nlp approaches. we see our work as a step towards successfully incorporating theoretical linguistic insights into nlp applications.