The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 41 ppsx

‘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 ‘‘future’’ 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.Hemakes 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.IfIhad 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 370 gilles fauconnier 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 honne ˆ te. [Indicative] b. Dioge ` ne cherche un homme qui soit honne ˆ te. [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. Some Grammatical Devices for Cognitive Construction 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, conjunctions þ 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 mental spaces 371 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 NP 1 be NP 2 , where NP 1 and NP 2 are noun phrases and identify elements a 1 and a 2 respectively, such that a 1 is in space X and a 2 is in space Y. Suppose F is the only con- nector linking spaces X and Y. Then the language expression NP 1 be NP 2 will stipulate that a 2 in Y is the counterpart of a 1 in X via connector F: a 2 ¼ F(a 1 ) 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 operational. 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 372 gilles fauconnier 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. Future Perspectives and Research Programs 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. NOTES 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. mental spaces 373 REFERENCES 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. 374 gilles fauconnier 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. mental spaces 375 Turner, Mark. 1996. The literary mind. New York: Oxford University Press. van Hoek, Karen. 1996. Conceptual locations for reference in American Sign Language. In Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser, eds., Spaces, worlds, and grammar 334–50. Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press. van Hoek, Karen. 1997. Anaphora and conceptual structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 376 gilles fauconnier chapter 15 CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION mark turner 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. 378 mark turner 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 conceptual integration 379 . 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. 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. 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