Conceptual blending

Conceptual blending (or conceptual integration) is a means of describing the cognitive processes involved in understanding meaning in language. In particular, it argues that large areas of meaning results from the motivated integration of information from separate mental structures to form a new structure, a blend, which combines selective information from those structures into a new, emergent, mental space.

For example, a sentence such as If Queen Victoria had the atom bomb, she would use it against the French is a counterfactual, whose comprehension is not easily explained in traditional semantics. Conceptual blending argues that the two sets of mental information (the atomic bomb and the relationship between Victorian Britain and France) are projected into a blend which contains combined information about the military power of the atomic bomb and the Victorian approach to Empire, and this blended mental space is then subconsciously 'simulated' under its own rules. In this way, a reader can understand what the counterfactual means using more information than what is originally supplied by the mind - the reader only knows disparate facts about Victoria and the atom bomb, whereas the blend contains gestalt information which is greater than its parts.

Selective Bibliography

Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. 1996. Blending as a Central Process of Grammar. In Adele Goldberg (ed), Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, 113–30. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. (One of the earliest coherent treatments of the theory, by its originators.)

Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. (The fullest exposition of the topic, in a popular style.)

Coulson, Seana. 2001. Semantic Leaps: Frame-shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Coulson's treatment is lucid and often more explicitly linguistic than Fauconnier and Turner.)