Though betraying traces of the Hauptwerk-prolonged gestation period, wideranging secondary references from linguistics to theatrical history, a voluminous fifle of clippings poured in pell-mell-Frame Analysis may also be regarded as yet another version, albeit a vastly distended one, of that peculiar monographic form which is Goffman's invention and to which we return below. It is in any case further testimony to the increasing rapprochement between ethnomethodology and semiotics, a development which may seem healthier for the latter, where it means liberation from a narrow dependence on linguistics, than for ethnomethodology, where, as we shall see in the present case, it suggests the spell of some distant and unattainable formalization, and is accompanied by a decided shift in emphasis from the content of social events and social phenomena to their form, from the concrete meanings of the raw material in question to the way in which they mean and ultimately to the nature of social meaning in general. This is the sense in which Frame Analysis constitutes a virtual monument to the new tendency, with its elaborate defense of the proposition that meanings, in everyday life, are the projection of the structure or form of the experiences in which they are embodied, and that they may most adequately be dealt with in terms of the ways in which such experiences are framed, in which they relate to, transpose (change "key," to use Goffman's musical analogy) or cancel other frames. That one may talk about social life this way (indeed, that, after Goffman, it will be difficult to avoid talking about it in these terms), Frame Analysis triumphantly demonstrates. It is semiotic, not so much in its application of specialized semiotic terminology and conceptual