engleski

Conceptual interaction, cognitive operations, and projection spaces

The paper examines Turner and Fauconnier’ s well-known blending theory. Blending (or conceptual integration) is a widespread cognitive mechanism which applies over many areas of conceptualization, including metaphor and metonymy. According to Turner and Fauconnier’ s theory, the understanding of some metaphorical expressions involves the activation of at least two input spaces, a generic space, and a blend. Turner and Fauconnier argue that in this process emergent structure may be created which is not present in any of the input spaces. They also claim that emergent structure is the result of a number of irregularities in the mapping process, such as the existence of asymmetries and non-correspondences between source and target. In contrast to this hypothesis, the authors present what they call the Combined Input Hypothesis. In their view, there are no irregularities in the mapping process. Instead, conceptual integration is the result of the principled combination of a number of partial source and target inputs, which have all the structure necessary not only for cross-domain mappings to take place but also for other cognitive operations such as domain expansion and domain reduction (related to metonymy), strengthening and mitigation (related to the loose use of scalar concepts and to hyperbole), saturation, and counterfactual reasoning, among others. In this account, there is a projection space that is constructed on the basis of these operations.

conceptual blending; mental spaces; metonymy; metaphor

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