Metaphor. Tony Veale
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one that contains emergent ideas and images that arise from neither input alone. Once again, Malcolm’s remark is intended to be understood in the context of a juxtaposition of Disneyland and Jurassic Park, but it is much more than a comparison, categorization, or analogy. It involves analogy, of course, as a constituent process: thus, The Pirates of the Caribbean is implicitly aligned with the attractions of Jurassic Park, and so the animatronic pirates of the former are aligned with the genetically-engineered dinosaurs of the latter. But the salient behaviors of the latter—such as eating people willy-nilly—are also integrated with the protagonists of the former, to generate a delightful counterfactual image of mechanical pirates eating hapless tourists in mouse-earred caps. In the terminology of Fauconnier and Turner [2002], Malcolm is running the blend, which is to say he is conducting a mental simulation within the blend space that results from the integration of the inputs, to stimulate his imagination into recognizing the emergent possibilities that were hitherto just latent in the blend.
Metaphor has traditionally been modeled as a two-space phenomenon, in which conceptual content in one mental space—representing the vehicle or source domain—is projected onto, or mapped onto, the corresponding content in another space representing the tenor or target domain. Conceptual blending theory adds to the number of spaces that are implicated in figurative processing and further clarifies the notion of a mental space. Thus, a generic space provides low-level schematic structures (such as the SPG and CONTAINER schemas) that can serve to unite the disparate elements of the input spaces, while the blend space is a new space, distinct from any of the input spaces, in which content from the inputs is selectively projected and integrated. When Malcolm runs the blend to imagine pirates eating tourists, his mental simulation takes place here, in the newly constructed blend space. The set of all spaces that contribute to a blend, and the connections that link them, is called a conceptual integration network. Following Fauconnier [1994, 1997], a mental space is defined to be an ad-hoc bundle of domain-related information that a speaker or listener brings to the comprehension process. Notice, in the example above, Hammond and Malcolm both refer to the domain of Jurassic Park (qua theme park), but each builds a different mental space for this domain. For Hammond, the park is a business venture beset by temporary technical glitches; for Malcolm, the park is a place born of hubris and beset by rampaging carnivores. As shown by Malcolm’s rejoinder, blending is especially suited to the construction and comprehension of counterfactual scenarios, since the blend space serves as a mental sand-box in which one can playfully experiment with the consequences of any given mapping between input spaces.
Blending theory also provides a relatively seamless framework for exploring and understanding the interactions between metaphor, analogy, metonymy, and concept invention. Indeed, one might argue that it is this seamlessness that often makes these phenomena so difficult to tease apart in the context of real examples (see Barnden [2010], who explores the “slippery” linkage between metaphor and metonymy). Consider the compound noun “dinosaur hunter,” commonly used in the media to describe those paleontologists that seek out the skeletal remains of prehistoric creatures. Is the word “hunter” used metaphorically here, as in the compound “bargain hunter,” or—since dinosaurs are animals every bit as fierce as elephants, rhinos, and lions—is it used literally (if a trifle unconventionally)? We can sidestep this question, while still arriving at an acceptable interpretation, by viewing the compound as a blend, in which the space of paleontology is integrated with the space of hunting to produce a new kind of hunter:prey relationship, one in which the hunter is temporally separated from his prey by 65 million years. That these hunters never actually see their prey in the flesh is beside the point, since metonymy allows us to conflate these long-dead dinosaurs with their skeletons. Indeed, Fauconnier and Turner [2002] argue that a common side-effect of conceptual blending is metonymic tightening, whereby the chains of associations that link the input spaces are compressed to create a tighter integration of conceptual content. So, when dinosaur skeletons are displayed in natural history museums, they are typically displayed as full-fledged dinosaurs, not as the mere parts of dinosaurs. If such displays are expertly framed so as to compress the holonymic relationship between a dinosaur and its bones into an identity relationship, blends such as “dinosaur hunter” do as much with language to achieve the same effect.
Fauconnier and Turner’s [2002] blending theory (or the theory of conceptual integration networks to give it its formal title) sets out to explain—via a general architecture of constraints and optimality principles—how blended spaces are constructed via the selective projection of elements from multiple input spaces. But, how are those input spaces constructed in the first place? In the case of blends such as “dinosaur hunter,” it is not unreasonable to assume that the mental spaces for dinosaur and hunter are derived, in part at least, from the corresponding entries in our mental lexicons. In other cases, these inputs may be the products of lower-level processes, such as the processes of conflation and differentiation that lead to the development of primary metaphors [Grady, 2005]. Lakoff and Johnson [1999] argue, for instance, that the neurally grounded processes that give rise to primary metaphors are complemented by conceptual processes that blend these primary inputs into more complex metaphors. For example, the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A (PURPOSEFUL) JOURNEY can be considered a blend of the primary metaphors PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS (which we saw earlier in Wernher von Braun’s metaphor of “aiming for the stars”) and ACTIONS ARE MOTIONS (as when, e.g., a plan becomes reality when it is “put in motion”). In yet other cases, the inputs to a blend may themselves be the products of conceptual blending, which is to say, the blend space of one conceptual integration network may serve as an input space to another. Blends are conceptual products, after all, and successful blends may gain currency in a culture, so that they are given an evocative name or paired with a linguistic form to yield a reusable construction that achieves the status of a cultural trope.
Consider the following description of the film director Sam Mendes from a British newspaper in 2010: “appearance: like the painting in George Clooney’s attic.” The newspaper was moved to sarcastic commentary after Mendes had been announced as the director of the next movie in the James Bond franchise, named Skyfall, and this sarcasm extended to its wry perspective on Clooney’s carefully-constructed media image. The use of the definite article “the” before “painting” would suggest that this is a picture previously known to us, but, lacking any knowledge of Clooney’s attic or of his taste in art, we must fall back on more general, cultural knowledge instead. Fortunately, the linguistic construction “painting in [the] attic” is strongly evocative of Oscar Wilde’s morality tale The Picture of Dorian Gray, not because we remember the actual text of the story but because we are familiar with the phrase’s repeated use in popular cultural as a shorthand for hidden excess and unnatural youthfulness. Recall that Wilde’s novel centers around the gilded youth of the title and his bargain with fate: as Dorian remains forever young and beautiful on the outside, the ravages that time, sin, and excess should have wrought on his appearance are instead reflected in his portrait, which Gray wisely conceals in his attic. The story is so entrenched in the popular imagination that it takes just the merest mention of “the” painting in the attic to bring this particular picture to mind. Like the Da…Dum…Da..Dum..DaDumDaDum theme from the movie Jaws, or Monty Norman’s signature theme from the James Bond movies, this simple construction evokes a wealth of unspoken narrative expectations. Of course, the fictitious painting lurking in Clooney’s attic is not literally a painting of Dorian Gray; rather, it is a painting of Clooney as Gray, which is to say, the painting of a counterfactual Clooney who has committed to the same body-for-soul deal with fate as Wilde’s anti-hero. In other words, “the painting in George Clooney’s attic” is a cue to create a conceptual blend from the input spaces George Clooney and Dorian Gray. A visual representation of the resulting integration network is presented in Figure 2.1.
The blend space of this integration network now becomes available as input to the higherlevel blend, where it is integrated with the target of the original simile, Sam Mendes. Because blends allow partial and highly selective projection of elements from their inputs onto their resulting blend spaces, what gets projected from this newly minted input space is the