Vital relations and compressions

An important function of blending is the provision of global insight. In other words, a blend is an imaginative feat that allows us to ‘grasp’ an idea by viewing it in a new way. According to Fauconnier and Turner (2002), conceptual blending achieves this by reducing complexity to human scale: the scope of human experience. For example, imagine that you are attending a lecture on evolution and the professor says: ‘The dinosaurs appeared at 10 pm, and were extinct by quarter past ten. Primates emerged at five minutes to midnight, Humans showed up on the stroke of twelve.’ This represents an attempt to achieve human scale by blending the vast tracts of evolutionary time with the time period of a 24-hour day. This is achieved by ‘compressing’ diffuse structure (over 4.6 billion years of evolution) into a more compact, and thus less complex structure (a 24-hour day). This achieves human scale, because the 24-hour day is perhaps the most salient temporal unit for humans. This conceptual integration achieves global insight by facilitating the comprehension of evolutionary time, since we have no first-hand experience of the vast time scales involved. Indeed, Fauconnier and Turner argue that the primary objective of conceptual blending is to achieve human scale. This in turn relates to a number of subgoals (see Table 12.3).

By explaining blending in terms of these goals, Fauconnier and Turner sub scribe to the view that blending provides humans with a way of ‘making sense of’ many disparate events and experiences. In this respect, the motivation for conceptual blending is not dissimilar from the explanation put forth in early Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which held that the human mind tends toward construal of the abstract in terms of the concrete, and that this tendency is an attempt to ‘grasp’ what is elusive in terms of what is familiar. In this section, we consider how blending achieves these goals by the compression of vital relations.

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مواضيع ذات صلة

Disintegration and decompression

A taxonomy of vital relations and their compressions

Vital relations

Further linguistic examples of blending

The nature of blending

Towards a theory of conceptual integration

The origins of Blending Theory

Conceptual blending

Meaning construction and mental spaces Summery

Epistemic distance

The tense-aspect system in Mental Spaces Theory

Tense and aspect in English