Media Matters - Conservatives continue to use Fox's 24 to support hawkish policies conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham told host Bill O'Reilly: "The average American out there loves the show 24. OK? They love Jack Bauer. They love 24. In my mind that's close to a national referendum that it's OK to use tough tactics against high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we're going to get." ... On the November 30, 2006, edition of his CNN Headline News program, Beck responded to an email that asked about the "ill treatment of our prisoners in Guantanamo" and asserted: "Now me, I'm for more Jack Bauers. The Jack Bauer that has to extract information."

The late lamented Buffy series was a gold mine of popular culture frame hypostases. My favorites are: "We must Clark Kent our way through life." from a conversation of two demon fighters complaining they must keep their identity secret from easily impressed girls and "I King Arthured it out of a stone." said by Buffy about her pulling a scythe from a rock in a cellar.

What is “frame hypostasis”? Let’s answer the question ‘what is “hypostasis”?’, first. It was first (I think) used by Bloomfield to describe uses of otherwise purely grammatical words to refer to their function and thus bringing it to light where it otherwise might be used automatically without reflection. His examples are “I’m tired of your buts and ifs.” Notice that all of a sudden you can use conjunctions and adverbs as nouns, or even verbs or adjectives (“Quit your iffing and butting” and “It’s a bit iffy”). Frame hypostasis is exactly the same thing only done to evoke a broader conceptual frame including its associated scenarios, metaphors, folk theories, etc. Some of these are more schematic than others and depend on the speakers/hearers ‘encyclopedic’ knowledge of the world. That’s why they are often further elaborated in subsequent clauses (like above “Now me, I’m for more Jack Bauers. The Jack Bauer that has to extract information.” where the speaker is drawing attention of the hearer on which part of the frame should be profiled for conceptual integration).

The quotations above also illustrate how powerful frame hypostasis and its negotiation are for public debate and public consciousness. It is not clear exactly how this works cumulatively (and it shouldn’t be overestimated) but it’s clearly an important and ubiquitous process that is simply a part of our socio-linguistic competence. (It is possible that some people are more competent at the creation and comprehension of frame hypostases than others and they may thus be more likely to become information and opinion brokers in their communities/groupings.)

Finally, it would be interesting to survey more languages to see how frame hypostasis is encoded in them. For instance, in Slavonic languages (and many others) it is not nearly as easy or common to convert any part of speech to a noun or verb. But still, these languages have ways of hypostasizing conceptual frames through clauses or discourse prefacing. In fact, I cannot imagine a language where it would not be possible to hypostasize a frame. Simply because that would mean that story-telling and mythology would also cease to be possible.