Mark Turner.  Critical Theory Group.  Maryland, 7 February 1996.

Blending (Conceptual and linguistic integration)

Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner
Seana Coulson, Richard Grush, Nili Mandelblit, Todd Oakley, Adrian Robert, Douglas Sun

Coulson, Seana.  [1995]  Analogic and metaphoric mapping in blended spaces.  Center for Research in Language Newsletter, 9, 1 2-12.
Fauconnier, Gilles.  [in press].  "Blends," chapter six in Mappings in Thought and Language.  Cambridge Cambridge University Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner.  [1994].  "Conceptual projection and middle spaces," UCSD Cognitive Science Technical Report 9401.  San Diego April.  
____________.  [1996]  "Blending as a Central Process of Grammar" in Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language.  Edited by Adele Goldberg.  Stanford Center for the Study of Language and Information. 
Grush, Rick & Nili Mandelblit [1996] "Blending in language, conceptual structure, and the cerebral cortex."  To be presented at the Second Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language (Buffalo).
Mandelblit, Nili.  [forthcoming]  Blends in Hebrew Causatives.  Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association.  (Albuquerque).
_____________.  [1995]  The theory of blending as part of the general epistemological developments in cognitive science.  Manuscript.
Oakley, Todd.  [1995].  "Ghost-brother" [and related chapters] in "Presence the conceptual basis of rhetorical effect."  University of Maryland dissertation.
Robert, Adrian.  [1996]  Blending in the interpretation of mathematical proofs.  To be presented at the Second Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language (Buffalo).
Sun, Douglas [1994]  "Thurber's Fables for our Time A Case Study in Satirical Use of the Great Chain Metaphor" in Studies in American Humor, new series volume 3, number 1 (1994), pages 51-61.
Turner, Mark. [in press]  "Conceptual Blending and Counterfactual Argument in the Social and Behavioral Sciences," Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, editors, Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics (Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, in press)
______________.  (1996).  The Literary Mind.  Chapter five, "Creative Blends."  New York Oxford University Press (September).
Turner, Mark and Gilles Fauconnier.  (1995)  "Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression."  Metaphor and Symbolic Activity.  103, 183-203.

• Blending on the Web http//www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn/WWW/blending.html

Literary examples

The Narrative Carriage
Before I introduce my Readers into the Company of Miss Charlotte Summers, I must make them acquainted with some of her Friends . . . for which Purpose, I must beg their Company as far as Carmarthenshire, in Wales.  Tho' the Journey is pretty long, and, in the ordinary Way of travelling, may take up some Days, yet we Authors are always provided with an easy flying Carriage, which can waft our Readers in an Instant, much longer Journeys than this we are now setting out on.  

Bertran de Born
[Context In the Inferno (canto 28, lines 139-142), Dante presents Bertran de Born, who while living had instigated strife between the King of England and the king's son.  In hell, Bertran carries his head in his hand, and says]

Perch'io parti' così giunte persone,	Because I parted people so joined,
partito porto il meo cerebro, lasso!	I carry my brain, alas, separated
dal suo principio ch'è in questo toncone.	from its root, which is in this trunk.
Così s'osserva in me lo contrapasso.	Thus is to be seen in me the retribution.

King John
"So foul a sky clears not without a storm. / Pour down thy weather." 
[Context King John speaks to a troubled-looking (and perhaps tongue-tied) messenger who appears before him.  Shakespeare, King John Act 4, scene 2, lines 108-109.]

The Rabbit in Wonderland
". . . nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, 'Oh dear!  Oh dear!  I shall be too late!'  (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural)."

Mounting the unicorn
Nirad Das (an Indian painter) You wish me to be less Indian?
Flora Crewe (an English poet) I did say that but I think what I meant was for you to be more Indian, or at any rate Indian, not Englished-up and all over me like a labrador and knocking things off tables with your tail. . . . Actually, I do know what I mean, I want you to be with me as you would be if I were Indian.
Das An Indian Miss Crewe!  Oh dear, that is a mental construction which has no counterpart in the material world.
Flora So is a unicorn, but you can imagine it.
Das You can imagine it but you cannot mount it.
Flora Imagining it was all I was asking in my case.
Das (terribly discomfited) Oh, Oh, my gracious!  I had no intention—I assure you . . .
	—Tom Stoppard, Indian Ink  (example from Robert Keohane)

Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu
For we talk of "Death" for convenience, but there are almost as many different deaths as there are people.  We do not possess a sense that would enable us to see, moving at full speed in every direction, these deaths, the active deaths aimed by destiny at this person or that.  Often there are deaths that will not be entirely relieved of their duties until two or even three years later.  They come in haste to plant a tumour in the side of a Swann, then depart to attend to other tasks, returning only when, the surgeons having performed their operation, it is necessary to plant the tumour there afresh.
Car nous disons la mort pour simplifier, mais il y en a presque autant que de personnes.  Nous ne possédons pas de sens qui nous permette de voir, courant à toute vitesse, dans toutes les directions, les morts, les morts actives dirigées par le destin ver tel ou tel.  Souvent ce sont des morts qui ne seront entièrement libérees de leur tâche que deux, trois ans après.  Elles courent vite poser un cancer au flanc d'un Swann, puis repartent pour d'autres besognes, ne revenant que quand l'opération des chirurgiens ayant eu lieu il faut poser le cancer à nouveau.

Ghost-Brother (example and analysis from Todd Oakley)
Art I wonder if Richieu and I would get along if he was still alive.
Françoise (his wife) Your brother?
A My Ghost-Brother, since he got killed before I was born.  He was only five or six.  . . . I didn't think much about him when I was growing up . . . He was mainly a large, blurry photograph hanging in my parents' bedroom.  The photo never threw tantrums or got in any kind of trouble. . . . It was an ideal kid, and I was a pain in the ass.  It's spooky having sibling rivalry with a snapshot! 
(Art Spiegelman, The Story of Maus II, A Survivor's Tale.)

Tale of the Ox and the Donkey
"There was once a wealthy farmer who owned many herds of cattle.  He knew the languages of beasts and birds.  In one of his stalls he kept an ox and a donkey.  At the end of each day, the ox came to the place where the donkey was tied and found it well swept and watered; the manger filled with sifted straw and well-winnowed barley; and the donkey lying at his ease, for the master seldom rode him.
"It chanced that one day the farmer heard the ox say to the donkey 'How fortunate you are!  I am worn out with toil, while you rest here in comfort.  You eat well-sifted barley and lack nothing.  It is only occasionally that your master rides you.  As for me, my life is perpetual drudgery at the plough and the millstone.'
"The donkey answered 'When you go out into the field and the yoke is placed upon your neck, pretend to be ill and drop down on your belly.  Do not rise even if they beat you; or if you do rise, lie down again.  When they take you back and place the fodder before you, do not eat it.  Abstain for a day or two; and thus shall you find a rest from toil.'
"Remember that the farmer was there and heard what passed between them.
"And so when the ploughman came to the ox with his fodder, he ate scarcely any of it.  And when the ploughman came the following morning to take him out into the field, the ox appeared to be far from well.  Then the farmer said to the ploughman 'Take the donkey and use him at the plough all day!'"

The Buddhist monk
Riddle of the Buddhist monk and the mountain A Buddhist monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at sunset, meditates at the top for several days until one dawn when he begins to walk back to the foot of the mountain, which he reaches at sunset.  Making no assumptions about his starting or stopping or about his pace during the trips, prove that there is a place on the path which he occupies at the same hour of the day on the two separate journeys.   

The debate with Kant
I claim that reason is a self-developing capacity.  Kant disagrees with me on this point.  He says it's innate, but I answer that that's begging the question, to which he counters, in Critique of Pure Reason, that only innate ideas have power.  But I say to that, what about neuronal group selection?  And he gives no answer.

The boat race
As we went to press, Rich Wilson and Bill Biewenga were barely maintaining a 4.5 day lead over the ghost of the clipper Northern Light, whose record run from San Francisco to Boston they're trying to beat.  In 1853, the clipper made the passage in 76 days, 8 hours.  —"Great America II," Latitude 38, volume 190, April 1993, page 100.  (Or "At this point, Great America II is 4.5 days ahead of Northern Light.")  

Why God won't get tenure (anonymous, from the Internet)

1. Only published one book.
2. It was in Hebrew.
3. It had no references.
4. He did not publish it in referenced journals.
5. Some doubt He even wrote it Himself.
6. He is not known for His cooperative work.
7. Sure, He created the world, but what has He done lately?
8. He did not get permission from any review board to work with human subjects.
9. When one experiment went awry, He tried to cover it up by drowning all the subjects.

10. When sample subjects do not behave as predicted, He deletes the whole sample.
11. He rarely comes to class—just tells His students to read the Book.
12. It is rumored that He sometimes lets His Son teach the class.
13. Although He only has 10 requirements, His students often fail His tests.
14. He expelled His first two students for learning.
15. His office hours were infrequent and usually 
held on a mountain top.

General Principles

•  Blending is a multi-purpose cognitive tool, on a par with analogy, recursion, mental modeling, conceptual categorization, and framing.  Moreover it operates interactively with all of the above.

•  Blending has uniform structural and dynamic properties  
—selective projection applies to inputs that share generic structure and can be partially mapped homomorphically onto each other;
—emergent structure is generated in three ways composition of projections from the inputs, completion based on independently recruited frames and scenarios, and  elaboration ("running the Blend");
—revision of the inputs can apply by reverse mapping from the Blend.

•  Entrenchment  Blends are often novel and generated on-line, but they recruit entrenched mappings and frames.  Blends can also become entrenched themselves, giving rise to shared conceptual and grammatical structure.  

•  Blends are a basic instrument for achieving event integration.

•  Although uniform in their dynamics, Blends can be applied to very different cognitive tasks and goals, e.g. transfer of emotions and inferences, counterfactual reasoning, conceptual change, category formation, creativity in science and art, humor, grammar, ...   

Optimality Principles

Integration The blend must constitute a tightly integrated scene that can be manipulated as a unit.  More generally, every space in the blend structure should have integration.

Web Manipulating the blend as a unit must maintain the web of appropriate connections to the input spaces easily and without additional surveillance or computation.  

Unpacking The blend alone must enable the understander to unpack the blend to reconstruct the inputs, the cross-space mapping, the generic space, and the network of connections between all these spaces

Topology For any input space and any element in that space projected into the blend, it is optimal for the relations of the element in the blend to match the relations of its counterpart.  

Good reason All things being equal, if an element appears in the blend, there will be pressure to find significance for this element.  Significance will include relevant links to other spaces and relevant functions in running the blend. 

Metonymy projection constraint When an element is projected from an input to the blend and a second element from that input is projected because of its metonymic link to the first, shorten the metonymic distance between them in the blend. 

Pressures

Non-disintegration.  Neutralize projections and topological relations that would dis-integrate the blend.  
Non-displacement   Do not disconnect valuable web connections to inputs.  
Non-interference. Avoid projections from input spaces to the blend that defeat each other in the blend.  
Non-ambiguity Do not create ambiguity in the blend that interferes with the computation.  
Backward projection  As the blend is run and develops emergent structure, avoid backward projection to an input that will disrupt the integration of the input itself.
A taxonomy of blend structures

TO  Structures

TF Structures  

Example boat race,  debate

One-sided TO Structure

Example  boxing business competitors, "simple" metaphors

Two-sided TO Symmetric

Examples  Complex numbers, with emergent structure of angles and multiplication;  
Desktop interface.

Two-sided TO Asymmetric
          
	An F_2 relation is projected to R_B, an F_B relation
	corresponding to incidental topology TI in Input 1.

Example fighting with Bob Dole in your pocket.

Two-sided TO Asymmetric with high secondary topology 
Example  boxing Pope

Two-sided TO Symmetric with metonymy projection
Printing press smashing car, with projection of intentionality.

Two-sided TO Symmetric with metonymy projection, additional frame recruitment
Workers with press and car;  Bertran de Born.

Partially Unfilled TO Structures  (UTO's)

Generic space does not specify Direction of Motion/Causality/Sequentiality/Intentionality
==>  Inputs may clash at a level lower than TO but higher than TF

TF-UTO  Example  Buddhist monk  —  both directions are projected to the Blend, without clash, because counterparts are not fused.

Two-sided UTO Example  digging your own grave  —  basic TF_1 comes from Input 1 (graves and death), but Causality, Sequentiality, Intentionality come from Input 2. This clash produces an emergent frame F_B in the Blend and a specific topology TF_B.
Pressures and competition

Non disintegration 
Example  The basic principle of the computer desktop is that everything is on the two-dimensional computer screen.  In the input space of real office work, the trashcan is not on the desktop.  By Topology, the location of the trashcan as not on the desktop would be projected to the computer interface blend; but doing so would destroy the internal integration of the blend, which is why, on the computer screen desktop, the trashcan is on the desktop.  Integration of the blend in this case can only be achieved by relaxing the topology constraint. 

Non displacement
Example  If a user is running five different applications on the desktop and wants to see only one of them, he can click "Hide Others" (conversely, "Show others"); to see a given document partially occluded by another, he need only click anywhere on the desired document.  But in the space of offices, to hide everything on your desk except the one thing you wish to focus on would require complex physical operations.  If these operations were all projected to the blend, it would sever its useful web connections to the input of computer operation.  Function guides competition here. 

Non interference
Example  In the space of office work, we often write "discard" across the top of an outdated version to be discarded.  In the computer desktop, the icon for a file has only one place for a label.  If we projected to the computer desktop the operation of labeling the document "discard" by making a click-command that put that label on the icon, we would lose the title of the file.  So the "title" label and the "discard" label from the space of office work defeat each other if both are projected to the blend.

Non ambiguity
Example  Ejecting floppy disks.  Superposition of  icon a over icon b "means" copying/inserting the contents of a "into" b.  So a plausible interpretation of the disk icon being moved over the trashcan icon is that the contents of the disk is transferred to the trashcan.  But in fact, the meaning in this particular case is entirely different ("eject disk from computer").  This makes the superposition schema in the blend ambiguous.

Backward projection
Example  Under pressure from Integration, the desktop blend places the trashcan on the desktop, but projecting this relation backward to the input of the actual desks would disrupt their efficient use. 

Multiple violation  
Ejecting floppies.
Copy/Paste  The command sequence Select-Copy-Paste on word-processing applications violates Topology.  In the Input where text is actually copied by scribes or xerox machines, copying (after selection) is a one-step operation.  There is no pasting and no clipboard.  Properties specific to the Integration in the blend make it convenient to decompose this operation into two, but they do not map topologically onto corresponding operations in the Input of "real copying."  The labels "Copy" and "Paste" chosen for these two operations in the Blend violate Web, and its corollary, Non-displacement  the Copy operation in the Blend (which actually produces no visible change in the text) does not correspond to the Copy operation in the Input (which does produce visible change); the Paste operation, which does produce change, is closer to "copying" in the Input, but the label "Paste" suggests a counterpart (pasting), which is not even part of the copying process.

Action blends
I'm driving, and someone is sitting in the front passenger seat, talking to me, but I have trouble hearing what they say.  I turn the volume knob on the car radio (which is off, of course).  I've blended the frames for listening to the radio and for conversing with a passenger.  I can't appeal to simple error I am in no way under the misapprehension that the voice is coming from the radio, or that turning knobs will make people speak more loudly.  What I have done, irrelevant, inefficient, and absurd as it may be, is EXTEND my category of controlled sound amplification within a blended space.  

Science
The substance here treated of does not possess any of the properties of ordinary fluids except that of freedom of motion.  It is not even a hypothetical fluid which is introduced to explain actual phenomena.  It is simply a collection of imaginary properties, which may be employed for establishing certain theorems in pure mathematics in a way more intelligible to ordinary minds than that in which algebraic symbols are used.  The use of the word 'Fluid' will not lead us into error if we remember that it simply denotes an imaginary substance with the properties -
[Maxwell 1855 - Electricity, Heat, Magnetism, Galvanism]  (Lansing)

"... several scientists insisted that the term virus is more than a nice metaphor. ... Although computer viruses are not fully alive, they embody many of the characteristics of life, and it is not hard to imagine computer viruses of the future that will be just as alive as biological viruses." 
[N.Y. Times 2/25/90]

Complex numbers  cross-space mapping maps real numbers to one-dimensional space,
maps 'imaginary' numbers to two-dimensional space (Wallis).  In the Blend numbers have number properties (addition, multiplication, square roots, etc.), vector properties (angle, magnitude), and point properties (coordinates). Angles come only from 'spatial' Input.  Multiplication comes only from 'number' input.  In Blend, multiplication includes addition of angles. (emergent structure).

Humor
MENENDEZ BROTHERS VIRUS  Eliminates your files, takes the disk space they previously occupied, and then claims that it was a victim of physical and sexual abuse on the part of the files it erased. (Coulson)

Jay Leno on Sidney Biddle Barrows' new job as "expert" commentator for the Heidi Fleiss trial at one of the cable channels
Instead of hiring a legal expert, they got a woman who made her name as a madam.  They figured it's a few bucks cheaper, and she essentially does the same thing.

Metaphor
—Boxing business competitors  Rupert Murdoch knocked out Iacocca.
—Printing press smashing a car with glee represents the same situation. (cartoon)
—George Bush was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.
—Dan Quayle was born on third base and thinks he kicked a field goal.
—The stork dropped George Bush on third base with a silver spoon in his mouth.
—Max is digging his own grave.
—He's driving his mother into her grave. ( Lakoff )
—The U.S. is in a position to exhume itself from the shallow grave that we've dug for ourselves. [ The UCSD Guardian ]  ( Coulson )
—Elmer was so angry, the smoke was coming out of his ears.
—"I have a feeling that if you walked through Huffington's deepest thoughts, you wouldn't get your feet wet."

Analogical counterfactuals
In France, Watergate would not have harmed Nixon.
"Why punish me for the sins of my father?" ( Coulson )
"If I were his wife, I would have been his widow long ago." ( Mandelblit )
If Churchill had been prime minister in 1938, WW II would have been averted.
If I were you, I wouldn't get pregnant.

Multiple Blends

 "What President Clinton did, bravely and brilliantly, I think, was to gamble that the repertory actors of the health care industry have frightened Americans so badly that we are willing to accept anything, including higher taxes, rather than to continue being extras in a medical melodrama that resembles nothing so much as an endless "Dracula" movie where the count always wins, right up to the last drop."  [Written by Richard Reeves, in a Los Angeles Times article titled "Best Performance by a Politician."  Example discovered by Bill Gleim]

  "The Dracula crowd will scream 'socialized medicine' and moan that you won't be able to pick your own doctor."   [Reeves.]