Cognitive Linguistics

Brandt, Line
October, 2000
This piece was a chapter of Brandt’s Thesis at Roskilde University. It covers expansions of and ‘philosophical differences’ with the Mental Spaces theory as defined by Fauconnier et al. Most particularly, she expands the model to deal with longer narratives.

She has particular and frequently voiced criticism for what she considers the failures of the ‘American School’ in using conceptual integration theory with mental processes that are too low-level to be accurately modeled with them (such as perceptual binding, which she says as unconscious process is not amenable to modeling with MST). One of her most voiced criticisms is that ‘American Blenders’ “acknowledge the significance of pragmatic factors in the prose. . . but disregard it in the diagrams that are supposed to realistically describe the process.”

She points out that Fauconnier 1997 does acknowledge this difficulty:

“I will assume […] that a combination of pragmatic and grammatical factors makes the appropriate domain type accessible. Clearly, however, this is at present an unsolved (although unavoidable) problem.”

Her model does seem to be capture details necessary to examining larger texts that other models leave on the floor. She does this by incorporating a ‘relevance’ space and using it in a blend from multiple rhetorical spaces she identifies by analysis of the piece. To do so she uses a genre she calls ’short-shorts’ which appear to be ideal for initial studies of this kind: they are short (1-3 page) narratives that frequently rely heavily on inherited frames and in which every word and sentence contributes to meaning.