The origins of Blending Theory
The origins of Blending Theory lie in the research programmes of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. While Fauconnier had developed Mental Spaces Theory in order to account for a number of traditional problems in meaning construction, as we saw in the previous chapter, Turner approached meaning construction from the perspective of his studies of metaphor in literary language. Fauconnier and Turner’s research programmes converged on a range of linguistic phenomena that appeared to share striking similarities and that resisted straightforward explanation by either of the frameworks they had developed. Fauconnier and Turner both observed that in many cases meaning construction appears to derive from structure that is apparently unavailable in the linguistic or conceptual structure that functions as the input to the meaning construction process. Blending Theory emerged from their attempts to account for this observation.
We begin our overview of Blending Theory with an example of the kind of linguistic phenomenon that motivated the development of this approach. The following example is metaphorical in nature, and yet cannot be straight forwardly accounted for by Conceptual Metaphor Theory:
Within the conceptual metaphor tradition, examples like (1) have been explained on the basis of a mapping from a source domain onto a target so that the target is understood in terms of the metaphorically projected structure. Applying this explanation to the example in (1), the target domain SURGEON is understood in terms of the source domain BUTCHER. In the source domain we have a butcher, a cleaver and an animal’s carcass that the butcher dismembers. In the target domain we have a surgeon, a scalpel and a live but unconscious patient on whom the surgeon operates. The mappings are given in Table 12.1.
The difficulty that this example poses for Conceptual Metaphor Theory is that the sentence in (1) actually implies a negative assessment (Grady, Oakley and Coulson 1999). Although butchery is a highly skilled profession, by conceptualising a surgeon as a butcher we are evaluating the surgeon as incompetent. This poses a difficulty for Conceptual Metaphor Theory because this negative assessment does not appear to derive from the source domain BUTCHER. While the butcher carries out work on dead animals, there is considerable expertise and skill involved, including detailed knowledge of the anatomy of particular animals, knowledge of different cuts of meat and so on. Given that butchery is recognised as a skilled profession, questions arise concerning the conceptual origin of the negative assessment arising from this example. Clearly, if metaphor rests on the mapping between pre-existing knowledge structures, the emergence of new meaning as a consequence of this mapping operation is not explained by Conceptual Metaphor Theory: how does the negative assessment of incompetence arise from conceptualising one highly skilled professional in terms of another?
This example points to powerful aspects of human cognition. Language and thought are not strictly compositional in the sense that they are additive. In other words, meaning construction cannot rely solely upon ‘simple’ conceptual projection processes like structuring one conceptual region in terms of another, as in the case of conceptual metaphors, or establishing connectors between counterparts in mental spaces. In example (1), the negative assessment is obvious and appears to be the driving force behind describing a surgeon as a butcher, yet this negative evaluation seems to be contained in neither of the input domains associated with the metaphor. Blending Theory accounts for the emergence of meanings like these by adopting the view that meaning construction involves emergent structure: meaning that is more than the sum of its component parts.
In this chapter, we present an overview of how Fauconnier and Turner draw together aspects of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Mental Spaces Theory in order to account for these emergent aspects of meaning. We begin by mapping out the architecture of Blending Theory (section 12.2), and then look at how it is applied to both linguistic and non-linguistic examples of meaning construction (section 12.3). We then explore the cognitive basis of conceptual blending (section 12.4) and examine Fauconnier and Turner’s claim that a small number of integration networks underlie the process of meaning construction (section 12.5). Finally, we look at the constraints on Blending Theory in terms of its theoretical machinery (section 12.6) and provide some explicit comparisons between Blending Theory and Conceptual Metaphor Theory (section 12.7).
