The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 41 ppsx

Then the language expression NP1be NP2 will stipulate that a2in Y is the counterpart of a1in X via connector F: a2¼ F a1 It should be emphasized that mental spaces and their connections

‘future’ time; in (11), the present tense corresponds to ‘past’ events; in (12), the past tense corresponds to a ‘present’ time; in (13), the past tense corresponds to a ‘fu-ture’ time; and in (14), the ‘‘fu‘fu-ture’’ tense corresponds to a ‘present’ time (10) a The boat leaves next week

b When he comes tomorrow, I’ll tell him about the party

c If I see him next week, I’ll ask him to call you

(11) a I’m walking down the street one day when suddenly this guy walks up

to me

b He catches the ball He runs He makes a touchdown (morning-after sports report)

(12) a Do you have a minute? I wanted to ask you a question

b I wish I lived closer to my family, now

c If I had time now, I would help you

(13) a If I had the time next week, I would go to your party

b I can’t go to the concert tonight You’ll have to tell me how it was (14) a That will be all for now

b He’s not on the train He will have missed it

More generally, tenses are used not just to reflect local time relations between neighboring spaces, but also to reflect epistemic distance, that is, whether a space is hypothetical or counterfactual with respect to its parent space The coding system remains the same, and a particular tense sequence may reflect both time and epi-stemic distance Here are some examples offered by Sweetser (1996: 323):

(15) a If you have Triple-A, then if you go to a telephone, you can solve

your problem

b If you had Triple-A, then if you went to a telephone, you could solve your problem

c If you had had Triple-A, then if you’d gone to a telephone, you could have solved your problem

We can interpret all three as referring to present time but with different epistemic stances The first is neutral as to the chances that you have Triple-A The second suggests that maybe you do not have it And the third is counterfactual: ‘‘you do not have Triple-A, but if you did ’’ Alternatively, one could interpret the sec-ond sentence as referring to a past event and being neutral as to what happened and

as to whether you had Triple-A, and the third sentence as referring to a past event and being counterfactual The embedded tenses (go, went, had gone, and can solve, could solve, could have solved) reflect the full epistemic and time path from the Base, regardless of the corresponding objective time

Mood (subjunctive vs indicative) can serve to indicate distinctions in space accessibility So, for example, a sentence like Diogenes is looking for a man who is honest opens a space in which ‘Diogenes finds an honest man’ Because of the Ac-cess Principle, which was discussed earlier, the description a man who is honest can

either access a new element directly in that space, or can identify a new element in the Base, and access its counterpart in the ‘look for’ space The first accessing path corresponds to a nonspecific interpretation: any honest man will do The second accessing path corresponds to a specific reading: there is a particular honest man that Diogenes is looking for In French, the equivalent of the verb copula is can be marked as either indicative or subjunctive:

(16) a Dioge`ne cherche un homme qui est honneˆte [Indicative]

b Dioge`ne cherche un homme qui soit honneˆte [Subjunctive]

Sentence (16a), with the indicative, allows both accessing paths, as in English, with perhaps a preference for access from the Base (the specific interpretation) The second sentence, on the other hand, allows only direct access to an element in the ‘look for’ space, the nonspecific reading This is because the subjunctive forces the description to be satisfied in the embedded ‘look for’ space

A range of intricate space accessibility phenomena linked to grammatical mood is studied in Mejı´as-Bikandi (1993, 1996) Rich aspectual phenomena in-volving spaces and viewpoint are discussed in Doiz-Bienzobas (1995) The general issue of discourse management through construction of linked spaces is addressed

in Takubo (1993) and Kinsui and Takubo (1990)

7 S o m e G r a m m a t i c a l D e v i c e s

f o r C o g n i t i v e C o n s t r u c t i o n

Language has many devices to guide the construction and connection of mental spaces Here are some of them:

a Space builders A space builder is a grammatical expression that either opens a new space or shifts focus to an existing space Space builders take

on a variety of grammatical forms, such as prepositional phrases, adver-bials, subject-verb complexes, conjunctionsþ clause Examples include in

1929, in that story, actually, in reality, in Susan’s opinion, Susan believes, Max hopes, and If it rains Grammatical techniques and strategies for building spaces in Japanese and English are compared in Fujii (1996) The psy-chological effects of using explicit space builders in discourse are examined

by Traxler et al (1997)

b Names and descriptions (grammatically noun phrases) Names (Max, Napoleon, NABISCO, etc.), and descriptions (the mailman, a vicious snake, some boys who were tired, etc.) either set up new elements or point to existing elements in the discourse construction They also associate such

elements with properties (e.g., ‘having the name Napoleon’, ‘being a boy’,

‘being tired’, etc.)

c Tenses and moods Tenses and moods play an important role in deter-mining what kind of space is in focus, its connection to the base space, its accessibility, and the location of counterparts used for identification

d Presuppositional constructions Some grammatical constructions, such

as definite descriptions, aspectuals, clefts and pseudo-clefts, signal

that an assignment of structure within a space is introduced in the pre-suppositional mode; this mode allows the structure to be propagated into neighboring spaces for the counterparts of the relevant elements

e Trans-spatial operators The copula (be in English) and other copula-tive verbs, such as become and remain, may stand for connectors be-tween spaces (The general function of be is to stand for domain map-pings; connection between spaces is a special case of this general function.) Consider a grammatical structure of the form NP1be NP2, where NP1

and NP2are noun phrases and identify elements a1and a2respectively, such that a1is in space X and a2is in space Y Suppose F is the only con-nector linking spaces X and Y Then the language expression NP1be NP2 will stipulate that a2in Y is the counterpart of a1in X via connector F:

a2¼ F (a1)

It should be emphasized that mental spaces and their connections are pervasive

in human thought and action whether or not language is directly involved (see Fauconnier and Turner 2002; Hutchins 2005) Mental spaces, then, are not directly linguistic, but a central function of language is to prompt for their construction and elaboration As a result, there is no fixed set of ways in which mental spaces come about The list above faithfully recapitulates some of the space-building gram-matical constructions found in language after language

It is sometimes asked what constraints there are on this powerful representa-tional apparatus and whether space building is fully operarepresenta-tional The framework and the analyses within it do indeed sharply delimit what language can do and cannot do It is useful in this regard to understand the following A representa-tional apparatus (e.g., a generative rule system, or a set-theoretically based for-mal semantics, or a Cognitive Grammar style framework) does not include a priori constraints other than the ones constitutive of the apparatus itself Constraints and principles are imposed on theories formulated using the apparatus The same

is true for analysis in terms of mental spaces The analysis is motivated by the generalizations that it affords The principles and constraints are discovered through empirically based research Some principles seem universal, for example, the Access Principle, presupposition projection, and the general form of the mech-anisms for tense Many other constraining principles are specific to a modality, a language, or a given construction This is the case for the tense system in English outlined above or for the ways in which anaphoric spaces are set up by signed

languages The other crucial thing to remember is that language does not by itself set up cognitive representations operationally defined by language forms It only prompts for cognitive constructions in context, so that the same form may give rise

to widely different constructions in different circumstances What the form pro-vides is a mapping scheme to be used in conjunction with available contextual, cultural resources at a given stage of preexisting mental space in discourse Uni-versal optimality constraints and governing principles have been proposed and studied in detail for integration networks of mental spaces in chapter 16 of The Way

We Think (Fauconnier and Turner 2002)

8 F u t u r e P e r s p e c t i v e s

a n d R e s e a r c h P r o g r a m s

Mental spaces have turned out to be useful and explanatory far beyond the ref-erence and presupposition phenomena that originally motivated them as theo-retical constructs Mappings and connections across mental spaces are used rou-tinely in all areas of Cognitive Linguistics and also in nonlinguistic research in cognitive science Highly sophisticated research continues to be done in all the areas where mental space theory was first applied, in particular on conditionals (see Dancygier 1998; Dancygier and Sweetser 1996, 2005), scoping phenomena on loc-ative and temporal domains (see Huumo 1996, 1998), grammar of sign languages (see Liddell 2003), discourse (see Epstein 2001), and frame-shifting (see Coulson 2001) But at the same time, there has been an explosion of research triggered by the discovery of wide-ranging phenomena where mental spaces are assembled, con-nected, and constructed within networks of conceptual integration This topic is discussed in a separate chapter of the present Handbook This area of research is particularly promising in that it links linguistic and nonlinguistic phenomena in systematic ways that begin to explain how and why there can be imaginative emer-gent structure in human thought in its everyday manifestations as well as in its most original and singular spurts of creativity

N O T E S

This chapter uses excerpts from Fauconnier (1985, 1997) and Fauconnier and Turner (2002)

to present the notion of mental spaces In addition, it places the research in its current intellectual context within, and outside of, Cognitive Linguistics.

R E F E R E N C E S

Brugman, Claudia 1996 Mental spaces and constructional meaning In Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser, eds., Spaces, worlds, and grammar 28–56 Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Coulson, Seana 2001 Semantic leaps: Frame-shifting and conceptual blending in meaning construction Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cutrer, L Michelle 1994 Time and tense in narratives and in everyday language PhD dissertation, University of California at San Diego.

Dancygier, Barbara 1998 Conditionals and prediction Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dancygier, Barbara, and Eve Sweetser 1996 Conditionals, distancing, and alternative spaces In Adele E Goldberg, ed., Conceptual structure, discourse and language 83–98 Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Dancygier, Barbara, and Eve Sweetser 2005 Mental spaces in grammar: Conditional con-structions Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dinsmore, John 1991 Partitioned representations Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Doiz-Bienzobas, Aintzane 1995 The preterite and the imperfect in Spanish: Past sit-uation vs Past viewpoint PhD dissertation, University of California at San

Diego.

Encreve´, Pierre 1988 ‘‘C’est Reagan qui a coule´ le billet vert’’ Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 71/72: 108–28.

Epstein, Richard 2001 The definite article, accessibility, and the construction of discourse referents Cognitive Linguistics 12: 333–78.

Fauconnier, Gilles 1985 Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural lan-guage Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Fauconnier, Gilles 1986 Roles and connecting paths In Charles Travis, ed., Meaning and interpretation 19–44 Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fauconnier, Gilles 1990 Invisible meaning Berkeley Linguistics Society 16: 309–404 Fauconnier, Gilles 1997 Mappings in thought and language Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fauconnier, Gilles 1998 Mental spaces and conceptual integration In Michael Tomasello, ed., The new psychology of language: Cognitive and functional approaches to language structure 1: 251–79 Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Fauconnier, Gilles, and Eve Sweetser, eds 1996 Spaces, worlds, and grammar Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner 2002 The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities New York: Basic Books.

Fridman-Mintz, Boris, and Scott Liddell 1998 Sequencing mental spaces in an ASL Narrative In Jean-Pierre Koenig, ed., Discourse and cognition 255–68 Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Fujii, Seiko 1996 English and Japanese devices for building mental spaces In Masayoshi Shibatani and Sandra Thompson, eds., Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics 76–90 Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hutchins, E 2005 Material anchors for conceptual blends Journal of Pragmatics 37: 1555–77.

Huumo, Tuomas 1996 A scoping hierarchy of locatives Cognitive Linguistics 7: 265–99 Huumo, Tuomas 1998 Bound spaces, starting points, and settings In Jean-Pierre Koenig, ed., Discourse and cognition: Bridging the gap 297–308 Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Kinsui, Satoshi, and Yukinori Takubo 1990 Danwakanri riron kara mita Nihongo no sijisi [A discourse management analysis of Japanese demonstrative expressions] In Nintikagaku no hatten [Advances in Japanese cognitive science] 3: 85–115.

Lakoff, George 1987 Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George 1996 Multiple selves In Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser, eds., Spaces, worlds, and grammar 91–123 Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Langacker, Ronald W 2003 One any Korean Linguistics 18: 65–105.

Liddell, Scott K 1995 Real, surrogate and token space: Grammatical consequences in ASL.

In Karen Emmorey and Judy S Reilly, eds., Language, gesture, and space 19–41 Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Liddell, Scott K 1996 Spatial representations in discourse: comparing spoken and signed language Lingua 98: 145–67.

Liddell, Scott K 2003 Grammar, gesture, and meaning in American Sign Language Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mejı´as-Bikandi, Errapel 1993 Syntax, discourse, and acts of mind: A study of the in-dicative/subjunctive in Spanish PhD dissertation, University of California at San Diego.

Mejı´as-Bikandi, Errapel 1996 Space accessibility and mood in Spanish In Gilles Fau-connier and Eve Sweetser, eds., Spaces, worlds, and grammar 157–78 Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press.

Mushin, Ilana 1998 Viewpoint shifts in narrative In Jean-Pierre Koenig, ed., Discourse and cognition 323–36 Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Poulin, Christine 1996 Manipulation of discourse spaces in American Sign Language In Adele E Goldberg, ed., Conceptual structure, discourse and language 421–33 Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Rubba, Jo 1996 Alternate grounds in the interpretation of deictic expressions In Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser, eds., Spaces, worlds, and grammar 227–61 Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sakahara, Shigeru 1996 Roles and identificational copular sentences In Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser, eds., Spaces, worlds, and grammar 262–89 Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sanders, Jose´, and Gisela Redeker 1996 Perspective and the representation of speech and thought in narrative discourse In Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser, eds., Spaces, worlds, and grammar 290–317 Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sweetser, Eve 1996 Mental spaces and the grammar of conditional constructions In Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser, eds., Spaces, worlds, and grammar 318–33 Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Takubo, Yuki 1993 Danwakanri riron kara mita Nihongo no hanjijitu jokenbun [Dis-course management analysis of Japanese counterfactuals] In T Masuoka, ed., Nihongo no joken hyogen [Conditionals in Japanese] 169–83 Tokyo: Kurosio shuppan Traxler, Matthew, Anthony Sanford, Joy Aked, and Linda Moxey 1997 Processing causal and diagnostic statements in discourse Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 23: 88–101.

Turner, Mark 1996 The literary mind New York: Oxford University Press.

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van Hoek, Karen 1997 Anaphora and conceptual structure Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

C O N C E P T U A L

I N T E G R A T I O N

m a r k t u r n e r

Conceptual integration,also called ‘‘blending,’’ is a basic mental operation that works over mental spaces (for an introduction to mental spaces, see Fauconnier, this volume, chapter 14) Conceptual integration theory was founded jointly by Gilles Fauconnier and myself in 1993 and has been elaborated by us for more than a decade Our research is surveyed in Fauconnier and Turner (2002); this chapter is essentially an abstract of that work The elements introduced here are treated in much greater detail there In the last several years, many researchers in various disciplines have advanced the basic science of blending research, as summarized at Turner (1995–2006)

As an example of blending, consider a common situation A man is serving

as a groomsman in a wedding party He is consciously enacting a familiar mental story, with roles, participants, a plot, and a goal But while he is fulfilling his role in the wedding story, he is remembering a different story, which took place a week before in Cabo San Lucas, in which he and his girlfriend, who is not present at the wedding, went diving in the hopes of retrieving sunken treasure Why, cognitively, should he be able to inhabit, mentally, these two stories at the same time? There are rich possibilities for confusion, but in all the central ways, he remains unconfused

He does not mistake the bride for his girlfriend, for the treasure, for the shark, or for himself He does not swim down the aisle, even as, in the other story, he is swim-ming He speaks normally even as, in the other story, he is underwater Everyone has had the experience of being in a moment of potential harm or achievement—

a fight, an accident, a negotiation, an interview—when it would seem to be in our

interest to give our complete attention to the moment, and yet even then, some other story has flitted unbidden into consciousness, without confusing us about the story we inhabit

Human beings go beyond merely imagining stories that run counter to the present story We can also make connections between different stories, or more generally, between different and conflicting mental spaces The groomsman, for example, can make analogical connections between his girlfriend and the bride and between himself and the groom We can also ‘‘blend’’ different mental spaces to create a third mental space with emergent structure The groomsman, for example, can blend these analogical counterparts into a daydream in which it is he and his girlfriend who are being married right now at this exact ceremony

This blended story is manifestly false, and he should not make the mistake, as

he obediently discharges his duties at the real wedding, of thinking that he is in the process of marrying his girlfriend But he forges the blended mental space, with potentially serious consequences: as he observes the daydream, he might come to realize that he likes it, and so formulate a plan of action to make it real Or, in the blended scene, when the bride is invited to say, ‘‘I do,’’ she might say, ‘‘I would never marry you!’’ Her fulguration might reveal to him a truth he had sensed only un-consciously, and this revelation might bring him regret or relief

Running multiple mental spaces, or, more generally, multiple constellated net-works of mental spaces, when we should be absorbed by only one, and blending them when they should be kept apart, is at the root of what makes us human Blending, especially in its advanced forms, is creative, and it can be forced into view

by pyrotechnic examples such as these Yet it works almost entirely below the ho-rizon of consciousness The products of blending frequently become entrenched

as units in conceptual structure, ready to be activated at a shot by someone who has learned or developed them Grammatical constructions are such entrenched units, and the origin of human language is a byproduct of the evolution of the most advanced form of blending, known as ‘‘double-scope’’ blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: chapter 9)

Conceptual integration conforms to a set of constitutive principles: (i) A par-tial cross-space mapping connects some counterparts in the input mental spaces For example, the girlfriend and the bride are connected in the wedding example (ii) There is a generic mental space, which maps onto each of the inputs and contains what the inputs have in common In the wedding example, the generic space has a man and a woman engaged in sustained pair bonding (iii) There is a fourth mental space, the blended space, often called ‘‘the blend.’’ It is in this space that the man is

in the process of marrying his girlfriend (iv) There is selective projection from the inputs to the blend It is important to emphasize that not all elements and relations from the inputs are projected to the blend

There are also typical features of conceptual integration networks Chief among these, the blend develops emergent structure not in the inputs In the wedding blend, for example, the man is marrying his girlfriend

The basic diagram in figure 15.1 illustrates the central features of conceptual integration

In the Basic Diagram, the circles represent mental spaces, the solid lines in-dicate the matching and cross-space mapping between the inputs, and the dotted lines indicate connections between inputs and either generic or blended spaces The solid square in the blended space stands for emergent structure While this static way of diagramming aspects of the process is convenient, such a diagram

is always a snapshot of an imaginative and complicated development that can involve deactivating previous connections, reframing previous spaces, and other actions

Emergent structure is generated in three ways: (i) Composition of projections from the inputs: blending can compose elements from the input spaces to provide relations that do not exist in the separate inputs (ii) Completion based on inde-pendently recruited frames and scenarios: we rarely realize the extent of background knowledge and structure that we bring into a blend unconsciously Blends recruit great ranges of such background meaning Pattern completion is the most basic kind of recruitment (iii) Elaboration: we elaborate blends by treating them as sim-ulations and running them imaginatively according to the principles that have been established for the blend Some of these principles for running the blend will have been brought to the blend by completion

Composition, completion, and elaboration lead to emergent structure in the blend; the blend contains structure that is not copied from the inputs In the Basic Diagram, the square inside the blend represents emergent structure

Figure 15.1 The basic diagram