Constructing Meaning

John Benjamins Publishing Company

This is a contribution from Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9:2 © 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet. For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com

Interview

Constructing meaning An interview with Gilles Fauconnier Seana Coulson

University of California, San Diego

S.C.: Conceptual integration theory and conceptual metaphor theory are sometimes portrayed as competing alternatives. In the past you’ve objected to the notion that these theories are somewhat at odds with one another. Would you like to take this opportunity to characterize the relationship between conceptual integration theory and conceptual metaphor theory? G.F.: As you know, the motivation for studying blending was not to supplant metaphor theory, but rather to examine a wide range of novel empirical data (conceptual blends). From that perspective, it turned out that well-known linguistic phenomena (e.g. clause union, compounds, conditionals, metaphor) use blending in interesting ways. In the case of metaphor, the blending framework allowed us to examine emergent structure explicitly, as created in the blended space and in the entire network. It also enabled a careful study of metaphors with more than one source input. The notion of compression clarified how metaphor could work when there were source/target mismatches: in a nutshell, the blended space can borrow compression from one input (the one traditionally called source) and crucial inferential structure from another (typically the target). So, returning to your question, conceptual integration provides a framework in no way specific to metaphor, but that framework does apply to the case of metaphor in ways that fruitfully extend conceptual metaphor theory. This is just ordinary scientific progress through generalization, not a paradigm change! For example we now see the Invariance Principle as a special case of the Optimality principles, and we see the experiential nature of metaphor as a case of meeting the overarching goal “achieve human scale.” S.C.: What’s your take on the Neural Theory of Metaphor? In various on-line forums, Lakoff has stated that there’s no neural correlate of blending? What do you think he means by that? What are your thoughts on the relationship between blending processes and neuroscience? G.F.: Neuroscience has made awesome progress in recent years, but does not provide direct observation of conceptual operations like mental space mapping. Cognitive neuroscience specifically seeks to relate neurobiology to the behavior of organisms. Imaging and brainwave technologies are used with great sophistication. The empirical evidence they provide Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9:2 (2011), 413–417. DOI 10.1075/rcl.9.2.04cou ISSN 1877–9751 / E-ISSN 1877–976X © John Benjamins Publishing Company

414 Seana Coulson

needs to be interpreted within theoretical frameworks. Imaging “shows” the brain and its activity under various circumstances, but it does not show the computations, mappings, and other operations that underlie this activity. This is why I have great sympathy for the Feldman-Lakoff project of using observable behavior and cognitive linguistic theory in order to build computational models that broadly satisfy neurobiological plausibility. Such models can make existing theory more precise/verifiable, while providing a target for neuroscientific explanation at a more fundamental level. Lakoff ’s current model incorporates many types of blending, and blending is therefore deemed to have neural correlates, hardly a surprising assumption. But the correlation is complex: blending creates networks of connected mental spaces, a “higher level” of organization, if you like. It is presumably not itself a primitive neural process. It is however a capacity of some brains, and perhaps an exclusively human capacity in its double-scope form. S.C.: How would you characterize the relationship between mental space theory and conceptual integration theory? It seems to me that many of the examples from your 1985/1994 work could be analyzed differently under the new framework. I’m thinking of sentences such as “Ursula thinks the wealthiest tea importer is handsome” in the case where the person Ursula thinks is the wealthiest tea importer is a handsome spy posing as Earl Grey, tea importer, but in fact the wealthiest tea importer is actually the very unattractive Lord Lipton. G.F.: With hindsight, here is how this framework evolved: The early work considered only mental spaces explicitly set up by grammatical cues (space builders) and focused on their connections across discourse. Then research by John Dinsmore and later Michelle Cutrer showed that in addition to space builders like “Max believes …”, “last year”, “in the painting”, “if…”, “otherwise”, tense and aspect also build up networks of connected mental spaces. Finally, the discovery of conceptual integration showed that building new spaces is far more general than initially thought and can occur with or without explicit grammatical marking. Many space-builders turn out to be space blenders: they set up two inputs and prompt for the construction of a novel blended space, for example a counterfactual. I think the Ursula-Lipton-Grey example remains a case of separate but connected mental spaces accounting for opaque vs. transparent readings through the access principle (and optimization). But tell me what you had in mind … S.C.: Basically, the idea is that factives (and representations and time spaces and all of the other phenomena that produce referential opacity) could be reinterpreted as involving simple conceptual integration networks in which the listener’s job is to figure out the way in which elements in the blended space map to the inputs of, e.g., “Ursula thinks” and “Base”. For example, in “Ursula thinks the wealthiest tea importer is handsome,” the listener is invited to construct a blended space in which “the wealthiest tea importer” is interpreted from the reality perspective (Base) and “is handsome” is interpreted from Ursula’s perspective (Ursual thinks) — so that in the blend she thinks Lord Lipton is handsome (funny — because he’s ugly!). The listener then suppresses this interpretation, instead interpreting (accessing) “the wealthiest tea importer” from the Ursula perspective. Transparent and opaque readings would simply involve mapping different structure from the inputs to the

© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

Constructing meaning 415

blend (in the same way that e.g. different interpretations of nominal compounds can be generated). The blended space might seem superfluous, but the thought is that it could help account for the humorous nature of some of these examples, and the way comprehension unfolds in time. G.F.: Access is not the same as projection through blending. The standard de re/ de dicto readings and also some cases of metonymy require access but do not compress or blend. So, “Ursula thinks Bond is awesome, but doesn’t know his name or who he is.” blocks optimization from the base, and forces the access meaning construction (i.e. transparent, de re reading). But we don’t want Ursula’s belief space to be a blend in this case, and we’re not told what U’s perspective actually is (did she just spot him in the crowd, or does she believe he’s a wealthy tea importer, …?). Nothing humorous ensues. The case you describe is more complex: speaker and hearer can run both meaning constructions (access or no access) in parallel or in succession and the result is a clash (and perhaps funny, depending on context, etc.). Not clear whether there is blending here, but there could be. We know that people exploit deliberate ambiguity in all kinds of clever ways. Consider also a different situation, with no spy and only Lipton, known to all (including Ursula) as the wealthiest tea importer. The statement “Ursula thinks the wealthiest tea importer is handsome” could be taken as a snide remark that Ursula’s greed changes her perceptions. This one lends itself well to a blended interpretation: a projection of Lipton with his wealth and availability, but with emergent structure that morphs him into a handsome suitor. It can also be construed as a deliberate ambiguity: the specific Lord Lipton, and the role interpretation: “whoever is the wealthiest tea importer would be found handsome by Ursula.” Unfolding of comprehension, of course, is a different matter. How people will process these meaning constructions should vary considerably depending on the amount of context, framing, and general knowledge available to them. Typically it’s only later in discourse that participants discover optimization should be suspended, and need to opt clearly for the de re or de dicto construction, when they are distinct. S.C.: Do you ever wonder whether anyone has read Chapter 16 of THE WAY WE THINK? What’s in that chapter anyway? G.F.: Yes, I remember surmising at a recent conference that maybe few people had studied or even read this theoretical chapter which comes far along in the book … Chapter 16 is a pretty detailed attempt to lay out the basic constraints that define and govern conceptual integration and compression. The chapter suggests that compression, with the constraints proposed, is a way of achieving “human scale” when thinking of anything at all. S.C.: You and Mark Turner have described constraints on conceptual integration in terms of a set of optimality principles. Is there a hierarchy amongst them? Do you think there’s more work to be done in terms of characterizing the operation of these principles? If so, what do you think is the best methodology for exploring this?


416 Seana Coulson

G.F.: What we observed is that when there is competition, one or another principle may “win” for reasons associated with the pragmatic goals of building the blend. So we did not find a context-independent hierarchy. However, addressing both parts of your question, Chapter 16 is far from the last word on these matters. It outlines a research program, not a final theory. More data should be gathered, analyzed in fine detail, with no qualms about modifying our initial proposals. Experimentation would be useful for this purpose: placing subjects in situations where optimality principles compete and measuring their interpretations, response time, detection of ambiguities, and so forth. S.C.: What do you think is the biggest misconception about conceptual integration theory? G.F.: I haven’t really noticed that many misconceptions. Simplifications, to be sure. For example one simplification is that it’s primarily an alternative to conceptual metaphor (see first question), or that it only involves four spaces, or that it’s not tightly constrained (see question on Chapter 16). Another misconception is that it’s “only” a theory and needs to be “proved” through experimentation; this stems from ignorance about how science works. In physics, geology, astronomy, biology, political science, evidence is gathered through all means available: extensive observation, cleverly designed experiments, computational models, counterfactual reasoning. The evidence thus acquired serves to corroborate or disconfirm analyses, to choose between analyses within a theoretical framework, and to imagine new analyses and new frameworks. Nothing ever gets “proved” outside of mathematics; empirical observation of all kinds is itself dependent on available theoretical frameworks, and the best we can do is achieve greater generalizations and more extensive coverage of all available data. S.C.: What aspects of conceptual integration theory do you see as ripe for development? G.F.: I don’t think we have anything close to a “conceptual integration theory.” Rather, we have a framework in which mental space mappings of all kinds, integration, compression, and emergent structure can be studied. This is something that neither traditional semantics, nor analytic philosophy, nor conceptual metaphor theory in its initial form could provide. It opens up many areas for further investigation, my own favorite one being compression, which I see as the most unexpected offspring of work on blending and most likely to raise deep questions about meaning and its neurobiological basis. There have been a remarkable number of excellent studies of integration and compression which lead the way for development in particular domains, theory-building, and experimental corroboration. Some that stand out are Nili Mandelblit’s research on grammatical constructions, Lakoff and Núñez’s approach to mathematics, Ed Hutchins’ and Bob Williams’ work on material anchors, Scott Liddell and Paul Dudis’ studies of gesture and signed languages, Barbara Dancygier’s analyses of narratives, her joint work with Eve Sweetser on conditionals, and of course your own research, Seana, on rhetoric, discourse, metaphor, timelines, and experimental methods. Many more are equally important and innovative in domains like design, computational models, literature and poetics, religion, advertising, … I would like to see all these avenues pursued, because there is still a lot of data to be discovered and understood, leading to deeper and perhaps thoroughly novel theoretical insights.


Constructing meaning 417

A general point, true for any field, is that future developments cannot be predicted. Compression, for instance, had not been apprehended in the extensive work on blending between 1993 and 1999. With hindsight, we see prodigious evidence for compression in the data gathered during that period, and yet we could not see it, because the theoretical notion was missing. Hopefully there will continue to be similar rethinking of many aspects of conceptual mapping, integration networks, and emergent structure. Author’s address Seana Coulson 9500 Gilman Drive Department 0515 La Jolla, CA 92093-0515 [email protected]

About the author Seana Coulson received her Ph.D. from UCSD’s Cognitive Science Department in 1997, and went on to a post-doctoral fellowship in the Psychology Department at the University of Arizona. She joined the faculty at UCSD’s Cognitive Science Department in 1999 and is currently an Associate Professor there. She directs the Brain & Cognition Lab and conducts research on conceptual integration and many other aspects of experimental pragmatics.



Constructing Meaning

Constructing Meaning

Suggest Documents