Chapter Fourteen
320
Blending theory and metaphors
Blending theory seems to be well suited to describe online processes of
understanding metaphors, and it stresses the importance of context for
online processing. It also acknowledges the significance of contextual
factors, but it does not make a principled distinction between semantics
and pragmatics. Such a distinction would presuppose that utterance
comprehension first delivers a context-invariant representation that can be
linguistically described by compositional rules linking the morphology,
semantics (i.e., truth-conditional semantics^5 ) and syntax of a sentence, and
that only afterwards pragmatics would work on the purely linguistic
representation to accommodate it to the context. Blending theory instead
claims that both the context and the sparse information provided by
language together evoke a conceptual representation (Tendahl and Gibbs
2008).
The notion of mental spaces is apparently a lot more context-dependent
and dynamic than conceptual metaphor theory’s notion of domains.
Blending in verbal communication starts with activating elements in
mental (input) spaces by the use of particular words. Next to lexical cues,
blending is also influenced by the grammar of the sentences, but whereas
words open the door to particular mental spaces, the grammatical cues
provide information about the mapping schemes that are cued by the
utterance. In this model, blending involves the establishment of partial
mappings between cognitive models in different spaces in the network,
and the projection of conceptual structure from space to space – the basic
four-space integration network (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 46).
Consider, for example, the construction of one of the Polish headlines
Korytarz dachu Ğwiata (‘the corridor of the roof of the world’) which is a
complex metaphor with three input spaces, two of which are concrete
(korytarz ‘corridor’ and dach ‘roof’) and one is abstract (the world
‘Ğwiat’), as shown in Figure 8. This structure is novel from the linguistic
point of view since a new metaphorical expression is created. This novel
metaphor is used with reference to Afghanistan’s Kyrgyz high-altitude
landscapes and is accompanied by a photograph of it.
(^5) Vogel (2001) seems to be right that truth conditions are not a small part of
meaning, but a profoundly essential part. Without truth conditions, comparisons
cannot happen: in order to compare two sets it is essential to be clear on what
comprises the membership criteria for the categories independently, even if the
criteria are vague or ill-defined for some compared sets (these criteria are instances
of truth conditions). In overlooking truth conditions, purely structural theories are
unable to characterize certain properties of metaphoricity.