BEATRIZ BERMEJO VILLAMARÍN

SUMMARY 6: BLENDING

According to the author, blending is a basic mental operation, interacting with other
basic mental operations such as conceptual mapping, framing, and image-schematic
structuring.

The author provides some definitions that are essential to understand what blending is.

A mental frame is a set of ideas, stereotypical for a community, and we activate them
mentally as we speak (for example, going to a hotel contains elements like ‘check-in’
and ‘check-out’, etcetera). A mental space is similar to a mental frame, but it is less
culturally affected and it involves smaller mental elements that we activate as we talk
(for example, my brother). Those mental spaces are stored in what is called a mental
web (which is a set of mental spaces), and they appear when needed (for example, when
we talk about a specific topic). The mental web has many conceptual connections, and
the most frequent mental connections are called “Vital Relations”: Time, Space, Identity
and others are contained in that set of connections. A blend is a mental space that results
from blending mental spaces in a mental web. This blend is a new mental space that
contains elements from both mental spaces: it develops a new meaning and new
elements (projections) that are not contained or available in previous mental spaces.
Those projections are emergent in that mental space, in other words, it is impossible that
they occur in previous mental spaces because they are the result of that blending.
Because blending is a mental integration created by human beings, the vast majority of
blended spaces are human-scale (bodily experience). Depending to which conclusion or
element we want to go with those mental spaces, we can compress or expand them as
needed to connect them up to a next idea.

BLENDING

MENTAL SPACE 1 MENTAL SPACE 2

My sister A hospital
A woman Workers (nurses,
… years old doctors)
Elements
Her name is Patients
…

EMERGENT
MENTAL SPACE

My sister is at the hospital

Will she be fine?
Which treatment does she
Emergent need?
projections Will they discover what she has?
To better illustrate this theory, the author chooses an example by Fauconnier and Turner
which is a riddle about a monk that goes up and down the hill and, at some point every
day, there is a place that the monk occupies at the same hour on the two separate
journeys.

Then, the author deals with some challenges to blending theory, in which it is clear that
there are no scientific studies that support this theory because, being a mental operation
of abstraction, it contains too many abstract elements to be analyzed physically. It
cannot be either programmed algorithmically, since mental processes do not have an
algorithmic way of reasoning. There is also some point of criticism in saying that, if we
are not aware of creating blending spaces, why is it that they are real? And here the
author states that, the same way we can see but we are not aware of the process (how
images travel from the eyes to the brain), we create new ideas through blending without
noticing about the process. This theory of blending is not complete because it is more
than a theory, in fact it is a framework for a research program on conceptual integration,
compression, mapping, and so on.

Some words activate specific mental webs, like safe, harm, love, danger, lucky,… a
consequence of blending can be polysemy, for example in words like over or up,
because they activate different mental spaces depending on where the individual wants
to arrive in her/ his conversation. Taking into account that a ew blended space contains
new emergent elements, it is not rare to think that blending can also create different
syntax (phrases, clauses and sentences). A final remark could be regarding Discourse
Analysis, for blending can fit the behavior of deictics: some words can activate different
and specific mental spaces (I, you, here, now, hope, thanks, etc…).