PowerPoint Presentation - Imagination · triumphs and tragedies, all the wars and all the famines, all the major advances. That is what is at stake—our ability to live on planet

LSA 119

Mental spaces and conceptual blendingGilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner155 Donner LabMW 10:30-12:15

http://blending.stanford.eduhttp://markturner.orghttp://cogsci.ucsd.edu/[email protected]@cogsci.ucsd.edu

1Wednesday, July 8, 2009

http://blending.stanford.edu


http://markturner.org


http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~faucon


mailto:[email protected]




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A typical network

Input I Input I 12

Blend

Generic Space


The riddle of the Buddhist MonkA Buddhist monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at sunset, meditates at the top overnight until, at dawn, he begins to walk back to the foot of the mountain, which he reaches at sunset. Make no assumptions about his starting or stopping or about his pace during the trips. Riddle: is there a place on the path which the monk occupies at the same hour of the day on the two separate journeys?


The riddle of the Buddhist Monk








Input spaces

Input Space 1 Input Space 2

d d1 2

aa

1

2


Cross-space mapping


d d1 2


Generic space


dd

d

12

Generic Space


Projection to the Blended Space


d

d

1

2

a

a

1

2

a '1

a '2

d'


Emergent Meaning in the Blended Space

Input Space 1 time t' (day d )

Input Space 2time t' (day d )

d d1 2

a a1 2

a '1a '2

d'1 2

Blended Spacetime t' (day d')


A typical network

Input I Input I 12

Blend

Generic Space


Mental Spaces and BlendingTerms familiar from the field of cognitive linguistics

• mental spaces• conceptual structure• connections, relations, mappings, projections,

matching, fictive structure• frames, scripts, models• identity, role-value, category, analogy, similarity,

counterfactuality, negation, metonymy, synechdoche, apostrophe, catachresis, figure, metaphor, . . .

• relational networks of form-meaning pairs• relation of conceptual structure and cognitive

operations to grammar• . . . .


Mental Spaces and BlendingBut fundamental differences . . .

• nature of meaning and language• compression• emergent structure


Mental Spaces and BlendingImportant corrections

• Conceptual connection and blending are• basic, not special• not costly• mostly run in backstage cognition,

almost never visible to consciousness, too complicated for consciousness



• Conceptual connection and blending are• mostly not supplemental to putative

cognitive operations (creativity, metonymy, counterfacuality, metaphor, . . .) but rather, for the most part, the source of these phenomena



• Conceptual connection and blending are• as far as we have been able to

determine, available across all conceptual domains



• Although conditions in any particular behavior - such as discourse, presentation, language, gesture, art, - can be consequential for particular integration networks, those conditions are not starting points for analyzing the operations of mental space networks and blending. The basic mental operations are general over all these conditions.


Selective ProjectionEmergent Structure

Blending Box Experiments







• Blending is a basic mental operation that works over conceptual networks of many different shapes, sizes, forms, and natures. It is not represented by any particular diagram with a certain number of spaces in a certain array and a certain dynamic development.


Mental Spaces and Blending













Coming into existence

special case

person p carrying object o in sling

Location 1

Carrying + container

Location 2

Stork flying

Location 1

Location 2

FlyingStork

Person p with object o in container c at Location 1

Person p with object o in container c at Location 2

p carries o in c

Birth of baby

time

Newborn who can hold its head up, hold rattle, smile, wear diaperBaby old

enough to hold its head up, hold rattle, smile, wear diaper

special case

Flying Stork/person with baby/object in diaper/sling/carrier at location 1

Stork/person with baby/object in sling/carrier arrives at location of parents

carries

Air travel

person flying


Orange county's predicament

O C

bankrupt

BEGGAR frame

beggar

poor

bangs ontin cupasks for help

beggar /OC

poor /bankrupt

bangs ontin cup

Orange county

O C

wealthy

RICH PERSON frame

person

wealthy

born withsilver spoon

person /OC

wealthy

hassilver spoon

rich beggar /OC

poor /bankrupt /wealthy

bangs ontin cup

WITHsilver spoon


noon

dusk

nighttime

nighttime

nighttime


Legendary general

Napoleon

Waterloo

Wellington

Napoleon (son)

undefeated

Napoleon wins at Waterloo

Alexander

son like father

son

fatherAlexander (father, undefeated)

Waterloo

Napoleon, like Alexander, is undefeated

Napoleon loses at Waterloo

ANALOGY

DISANALOGY


boss •

Input to Blend 1

Blend 1

Input to Blend 2

Blend 2

Megablend

• •

•

worker •

• daughter

• father

Ann/boss

worker

father/Max

daughter

Ann

•

Max

Ann/boss worker/daughter

father/Max


Health Movies

Vampires

HeatEmotion

Body

Horror Movies Story of Emotion and Body

Blend Blend





An Inconvenient Truth“An Inconvenient Truth” is the film version of Al Gore’s slide-show presentation on global warming. Close to the end, Gore shows a picture of the Earth as a what he calls a “pale blue dot.” The Earth is a single pixel on a huge cosmological screen, difficult even to pick out when he points at it. The picture was taken from a distance in space of 4 billion miles. Gore says, “Everything that has ever happened in all of human history has happened on that dot. All the triumphs and tragedies, all the wars and all the famines, all the major advances. That is what is at stake—our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization.”And then he concludes the film with this blend: “Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, 'What were our parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had the chance?’ We have to hear that question from them now.”


Pale Blue Dot

⇐



The Time Blendat the end of

“An Inconvenient Truth”

And then he concludes the film with this blend: “Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, 'What were our parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had the chance?’ We have to hear that question from them now.”


Mirror Network: Fictive Interaction


1999 1985 1979 1967 1958 1954


Linguistic constructions are made available by network projections

“Hicham el-Gerrouj defeated Roger Bannister by 120 yards”

“Hicham el-Gerrouj beat Roger Bannister.”


Fictive InteractionAbrantes, Ana Margarida. Fictive Interaction as an Instance of Theatricality in Cognition. 2009. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1409396Pascual, Esther, E. Królak & Th.A.J.M. Janssen. In preparation. Do-it-yourself compounds: Scenarios set up through fictive interaction. Cognitive Linguistics. Pascual, Esther. 2008. Fictive interaction blends in everyday life and courtroom settings. In A. Hougaard & T. Oakley (eds.). Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pascual, Esther 2008. Text for context, trial for trialogue: An ethnographic study of a fictive interaction blend. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 6: 50-82. Pascual, E. 2006a. Questions in legal monologues: Fictive interaction as argumentative strategy in a murder trial. Text & Talk 26(3): 383-402. Pascual, Esther. 2006b. Fictive interaction within the sentence: A communicative type of fictivity in grammar. Cognitive Linguistics. Volume 17, Issue 2, Pages 245–267.Pascual, Esther. 2002. Imaginary Trialogues: Conceptual Blending and Fictive Interaction in Criminal Courts. Utrecht: LOT Dissertation Series 68.57


http://ssrn.com/abstract=1409396

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1409396

http://www.let.vu.nl/staf/e.pascual/PB17003.PDF







LSA 119

Mental spaces and conceptual blendingGilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner155 Donner LabMW 10:30-12:15

http://blending.stanford.eduhttp://markturner.orghttp://cogsci.ucsd.edu/[email protected]@cogsci.ucsd.edu












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PowerPoint Presentation - Imagination · triumphs and tragedies, all the wars and all the famines, all the major advances. That is what is at stake—our ability to live on planet