Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas

University of Murcia | UM · Department of English Philology

This article reviews the major take-home points of Gilles Fauconnier’s work, especially of his collaborative work with Mark Turner on blending theory, for readers who are not familiar with this theoretical framework or who could benefit from an external perspective. I emphasize the overarching lessons to be learned from the notions of mental spaces...

Understanding compositional practices is a major goal of musicology and music theory. Compositional practices have been traditionally viewed as disembodied and idiosyncratic. This view makes it hard to integrate musical creativity into our understanding of the general cognitive processes underlying meaning construction. To overcome this unnecessary...

This chapter will explore the embodied , enacted and embedded nature of co-speech gestures in the meaning-making process of time conceptualization. We will review three different contextualized communicative exchanges extracted from American Television interviews. First, we will offer a step-by-step form description of the different gesture realiza...

What takes place in the minds of composers when they struggle to incorporate a given temporal concept into a musical work? Spectral composers have produced detailed theoretical proposals about time in music, but how exactly those ideas influenced their musical practices remains an extremely challenging question. Graphical representations in their s...

The chunking problem is central to linguistics, semiotics, and poetics: How do we learn to organize a language into patterns and to use those patterns creatively? Linguistics has mainly offered two answers, one based on rule inference through innate capacities for processing and the other based on usage and on outstanding capacities for memory and...

The development of large-scale corpora has led to a quantum leap in our understanding of speech in recent years. By contrast, the analysis of massive datasets has so far had a limited impact on the study of gesture and other visual communicative behaviors. We utilized the UCLA-Red Hen Lab multi-billion-word repository of video recordings, all of th...

The understanding of time in spatial terms (“The hour is approaching”) has become the most studied case of conceptual projection in the cognitive sciences. However, the predominant models of direct transfer from the concrete to the abstract, from space to time, do not account even for many conventional meanings, such as the subjective value of spee...

Human communication is multimodal and includes elements such as gesture and facial expression along with spoken language. Modern technology makes it feasible to capture all such aspects of communication in natural settings. As a result, similar to fields such as genetics, astronomy and neuroscience, scholars in areas such as linguistics and communi...

Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0271530917301271 We relate improvisation in epic singing to cognitive linguistics, postulating that oral formulas are acquired analogous to phrasal patterns in language. Singers' use of reporting phrases in six performances of a South-Slavic epic reveals (1) a "prototypical" construc...

There is little doubt that spatial information underlies a great deal of our processing of temporal information. Research on the ways in which timelines are associated with specific grammatical constructions has just started, and has brought forward new challenges for construction grammar. A true multimodal construction grammar cannot be developed...

Despite the exponential growth of metaphor studies in recent decades, personification has nonetheless remained overshadowed by other types of metaphor. Specifically, it has been suggested that not all personifications are equal in that they vary considerably in linguistic, conceptual and communicative terms. In this paper, we argue that personifica...

We analyze a group of literary motifs for building fictive interactions, recurring across one of the richest examples of affective communication in Greek literature: the expression of the causes and effects of love in terms of scenes between lover and beloved. In this thematic set, the poetic expression of love is articulated through a direct or in...

Conceptual Metaphor Theory has used TIME IS SPACE as the paradigmatic case of projection from a concrete to an abstract domain. More recently, within the framework of Conceptual Integration or Blending Theory, a more complex view of time-space mappings – and of mappings in general – has been proposed. Rather than a binary, unidirectional projection...

In this chapter, we seek to show that the human mind can create blended discourse, or fictive communication, because it is able to do advanced conceptual blending. Thanks to advanced blending, human beings can integrate unrelated experiences and concepts into new mental wholes with novel properties. We analyze how instances of fictive communication...

Full text available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2694704 We seek to show that the human mind can create blended discourse, or fictive communication, because it is able to do advanced conceptual blending. Thanks to advanced blending, human beings can integrate unrelated experiences and concepts into new mental wholes with...

Research on image schemas in language and cognition (containment, path, blockage, etc.) is largely based on de-contextualized linguistic expressions. This results in a view of image schemas as somehow detached from experience, constituting source domains for fixed conceptual projections from the concrete to the abstract. By showcasing creative exam...

What can oral poetic traditions teach us about language and the human mind? Oral Poetics has produced insights relevant not only for the study of traditional poetry, but also for our general understanding of language and cognition: formulaic style as a product of rehearsed improvisation, the thematic structuring of traditional narratives, or the po...

This book is an invitation to reflect on the value of oral poetic traditions for the study of aesthetics, language, and the mind. It is also an invitation to explore how much more we can learn about orality in verbal art if we combine the analytic tools that cognitive science and oral poetics have been developing separately. Cognitive approaches to...

The notions of construction and formula are, respectively, the main currencies of cognitive grammar and the theory of oral-formulaic composition in performance. Even though they originated independently, both formulas and constructions are defined as form-meaning-function patterns, and, as such, represent the central theoretical constructs in their...

This paper proposes to rethink the study of oral performativity in the context of modern cognitive science. To that end, we list a number of so-far unrecognized parallels between the Parry-Lord theory of composition in performance and what has come to be known as “usage-based” approaches to grammar and language acquisition in the field of Cognitive...

Metaphor and simile research has traditionally focused on the projection of content from vehicle to topic, thereby revealing new meaning in the topic. We show that the meaning of vehicles also changes during figurative language understanding. Participants read a poem that likens the temporal self to a snake being divided by a machete, and were aske...

In this theoretical paper we propose three different kinds of cognitive structure that have not been differentiated in the psychological and cognitive linguistic literatures. They are spatial primitives , image schemas , and schematic integrations. Spatial primitives are the first conceptual building blocks formed in infancy, image schemas are simp...

Conceptual Integration theorists have recently revised the time is space conceptual metaphor, and proposed a more complex structure of mappings. The result of that network of mappings is a particular event of motion through space, conditioned by its goal to represent time. Coulson and Pagán Cánovas (forthcoming) have studied the timeline as a mater...

We analyze conceptual patterns shared by Michael Ende’s novel about time, Momo , and examples of time conceptualization from psychology, sociology, economics, conventional language, and real social practices. We study three major mappings in the materialization of time: time as money in relation with time banking, time units as objects produced by...

When and how were the arrows of love created? Individual invention has been argued for by classicists; a connection to everyday metaphors has been suggested in cognitive linguistics. I propose new cognitive-theoretical tools: the Cause Personification blend and an EMISSION image-schema. I explain the emergence of Love the Archer in Antiquity throug...

One of the most broadly investigated topics in the literature on conceptual mappings is the importance of spatial construals for thinking and talking about time. In two forthcoming articles [1] [7] we explore how people understand timelines - both as graphical objects, in discourse about timelines taken from newspapers and the web, and in poetic ex...

One of the most broadly investigated topics in the literature on conceptual metaphor is the importance of spatial construals for thinking and talking about time. Here we address the relationship between conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and conceptual integration theory (CIT) by exploring how people understand timelines – both as graphical objects,...

I use the network model of Blending Theory to present a conceptual generalization over several case studies of imagery, belonging to three different periods of Greek love poetry: ancient Greek lyric, medieval folksongs, and two 20th century poets, Ritsos and Elytis. All these linguistic expressions intend to convey a rather immediate emotional resp...