Gilles Fauconnier

University of California, San Diego | UCSD · Department of Cognitive Science

In working on matters related to language over the years, my greatest surprise has been to find out how little of the rich meanings we construct is explicitly contained in the forms of language itself. I had taken it for granted, at first, that languages were essentially coding systems for semantic relations, and that sentences, when appropriately...

Mental spaces are very partial assemblies constructed as we think and talk for purposes of local understanding and action. It has been hypothesized that at the neural level, mental spaces are sets of activated neuronal assemblies and that the connections between elements correspond to coactivation-bindings. On this view, mental spaces operate in wo...

Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1990), pp. 390-404

Professor Gilles Fauconnier is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California San Diego. He is considered one of the most influential scholars of our age in language and communication. Fauconnier is one of the founders of cognitive linguistics through his work on pragmatic scales and mental...

There is a mistaken perception that ‘metaphor theory’ and ‘conceptual blending’ are competing views, and that there is some argument between us over this. The real situation is this: We have been good friends and colleagues for over forty years, and we remain so. We fully respect, and make use of, each other’s work. We are both scientists, who do b...

Conceptual integration - also known as “blending�? is a basic mental operation whose uniform structural and dynamic properties apply over many areas of thought and action, including metaphor and metonymy. Conceptual integration creates networks of connections between mental spaces. Some of these mental spaces serve as inputs to a new, blended menta...

Meaning construction through language requires advanced mental operations also necessary for other higher-order, specifically human behaviors. Biological evolution slowly improved conceptual mapping capacities until human beings reached the level of double-scope blending, perhaps 50 to 80 thousand years ago, at which point language, along with othe...

It is a great virtue of cognitive linguistics to have explored the central role of metaphor and metonymy in human conceptualization. Recent work has studied in depth the mappings, compressions, and integrations that yield a diversity of surface products, not just in language use, but also in religion, art, math, technology, and other human endeavor...

The study of conceptual mappings, including metaphoric mappings, has produced great insights over the last several decades, not only for the study of language, but also for the study of such subjects as scientific discovery, design, mathematical thinking, and computer interfaces. This tradition of inquiry is fulfilling its promises, with new findin...

Further work on the origin of language as derivative of the origin of double-scope conceptual integration. Based on chapter 9 of The Way We Think.

Language as a Prompt: Turner's xyz ConstructionsOpacity and PresuppositionsWord and Sentence MeaningsPerformativesCognitive Approaches to Some Other Classical Pragmatic Issues

Cognitive linguistics is a theoretical and empirical programme that goes beyond the visible structure of language to investigate the complex background operations of cognition that create grammar, conceptualization, discourse, and thought itself.

Compression in conceptual integration networks gives rise to a variety of mental patterns which include counterfactuals, metaphor, and grammatical constructions. Novel dynamic structure is emergent in such networks. The present paper explores the notion of emergence. Data from mathematics, advertising, everyday metaphorical reasoning, and grammar i...

Se enuncia la teoria de la fusion conceptual que avanza sobre la teoria bipolar de la proyeccion. En la teoria de la fusion existen cuatro dominios que son objeto de diversas operaciones, algunas proyectivas y otras de mezcla y union de dominios diversos, lo que crea diferentes campos de referencia sobre los que operar. La fusion conceptual es ejem...

Widespread metaphors such as "he exploded" project physical categories to emotional phenomena. The traditional two-domain model of metaphor postulates that in such cases the source domain enables the understanding of the target domain. The authors prove that this model is sufficient to explain culturally entrenched metaphors, but fails to cope with...

In this article, we look at some aspects of polysemy which derive from the power of meaning potential. More specifically, we focus on aspects linked to the operation of conceptual blending, a major cognitive resource for creativity in many of its manifestations.

Widespread metaphors such as "he exploded" project physical categories to emotional phenomena. The traditional two-domain model of metaphor postulates that in such cases the source domain enables the understanding of the target domain. The authors prove that this model is sufficient to explain culturally entrenched metaphors, but fails to cope with...

Widespread metaphors such as "he exploded" project physical categories to emotional phenomena. The traditional two-domain model of metaphor postulates that in such cases the source domain enables the understanding of the target domain. The authors prove that this model is sufficient to explain culturally entrenched metaphors, but fails to cope with...

Compression is a phenomenon in conceptual integration that allows human beings simultaneously to control long diffuse chains of logical reasoning and to grasp the global meanings of such chains. Compression operates on a small set (under twenty) of relations rooted in fundamental human neurobiology as it applies to shared physical and socio-cultura...

this paper: Horac io Arl Costa, Margherita Benzi, Paolo Bouquet, GillesFaucIhj'I Marc ello Frixione, Mic)j Green, Diego Marc`)j Marina Sbis. Spec.h thanks to the Pittsburgh Center for Philosophy ofSc`j)Ij where I first presented theschH' of this paper, and to theGiuncHhjH researc group in Trento, whic set up the great opportunity for discHHMh suc t...

This volume contains selected papers from the 5th ICLC, Amsterdam 1997. The papers present cognitive analyses of a variety of constructions (phrasal verbs, prepositional phrases, transitivity, accusative versus dative objects, possessives, gerunds, passives, causatives, conditionals), in a variety of languages (English, German, Dutch, Polish, Greek...

Conceptual projection from one mental space to another always involves projection to "middle" spaces---abstract "generic" middle spaces or richer "blended" middle spaces. Projection to a middle space is a general cognitive process, operating uniformly at different levels of abstraction and under superficially divergent contextual circumstances. Mid...

An analysis of the way in which conceptual integration, "blending," underlies human creativity, with examples from mathematics, language, literature, science, journalism, etc.

Understanding the role of simulation in conceptualization has become a priority for cognitive science. Barsalou makes a valuable contribution in that direction. The present commentary points to theoretical issues that need to be refined and elaborated in order to account for key aspects of meaning construction, such as negation, counterfactuals...

Conceptual projection from one mental space to another always involves projection to "middle" spaces---abstract "generic" middle spaces or richer "blended" middle spaces. Projection to a middle space is a general cognitive process, operating uniformly at different levels of abstraction and under superficially divergent contextual circumstances. Mid...

Conceptual integration—“blending”—is a general cognitive operation on a par with analogy, recursion, mental modeling, conceptual categorization, and framing. It serves a variety of cognitive purposes. It is dynamic, supple, and active in the moment of thinking. It yields products that frequently become entrenched in conceptual structure and grammar...

An investigation of the way in which the basic mental operation of conceptual integration ("blending") is central to grammar.This is an expanded web version of Fauconnier and Turner, 1996 ("Blending as a Central Process of Grammar." in Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language. Edited by Adele Goldberg. Stanford: Center for the Study of Languag...

Conceptual integration - "blending" - is a general cognitive operation used to construct meaning. It is dynamic, supple, and active in the moment of thinking. It interacts with other general cognitive operations. It yields products that frequently become entrenched in conceptual structure and grammar. It often performs new blending on its entrenche...

Meaning in everyday thought and language is constructed at lightning speed. We are not conscious of the staggering complexity of the cognitive operations that drive our simplest behavior. This 1997 book examines a central component of meaning construction: the mappings that link mental spaces. A deep result of the research is that the same principl...

In the highly influential mental-spaces framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier in the mid-1980s, the mind creates multiple cognitive "spaces" to mediate its understanding of relations and activities in the world, and to engage in creative thought. These twelve original papers extend the mental-spaces framework and demonstrate its utility in solvi...

We pursue here our exploration of conceptual blending and of the "many-space" model, which replaces the standard "two-domain" model. In blending, structure from two or more input mental spaces is projected to a separate "blended" space, which inherits partial structure from the inputs, and has emergent structure of its own. New examples are present...

Because of the attention given to overt language structure at the expense of associated cognitive constructions, the importance of domain mappings in theories of meaning and language has too often been overlooked. This paper gives a brief outline of the general issues, and studies one intriguing example in more depth: how we talk and think about th...

There are some interesting correlations between the semantic notions of “role,” “value,” “connector,” and the grammatical peculiarities of the so-called “copulative” sentences in French noted by Moreau (1970) and Ruwet(1972).

Mental Spaces is the classic introduction to the study of mental spaces and conceptual projection, as revealed through the structure and use of language. It examines in detail the dynamic construction of connected domains as discourse unfolds. The discovery of mental space organization has modified our conception of language and thought: powerful a...

The following analysis has several goals : reducing causative constructions (faire faire) to one simple process. showing that this process, Union, is responsible for many verbal or predicative amalgams, traditionally associated with types of raising, or complement subject deletion (equi), or predicative, auxiliary, and modal structures. showing how...

Concludes that many conceptually novel and exciting directions of investigation are opening up in the field of linguistics and that their psychological implications are by no means negligible. They may alter ways of thinking about language in fundamental respects without undermining the possibility of a scientifically rigorous approach. (8 ref) (Ps...

Sentential structures may contain positions that can be filled by other sentential structures: (1) Although —, we arrived late. (2) Galileo believes that —. (3) It is too early for —. (4) If —, then Monaco will attack. I will call such structures environments and symbolize their semantic content, with a corresponding empty slot, as U — V, U’ — V’...

Wie man Wahrheit kontrolliert. Die Tendenz, ein Untersuchungsfeld und die Probleme innerhalb desselben autonom zu setzen, ist in der strukturalen (klassischen und generativen) Linguistik und in der analytischen Philosophie besonders stark. Diese Autonomisierung des Untersuchungsgegenstandes ist manchmal wegen der operationalisierenden Idealisierung...

The recourse to abstract levels of representation is a trademark of contemporary linguistic theory and methodology, but the epistemological status of this mode of explanation is seldom examined. Because of its fecundity in certain areas of syntax and phonology it has been extended indiscriminately to other domains: in this light, I challenge here t...

Much recent work about language has been representational: the solution of particular problems and the account of linguistic distributions is often perceived as being the choice (or the discovery) of abstract representations (e.g., semantic, syntactic, logical…) which reflect directly, largely by means of their configurations, properties and genera...

Neither classical transformations nor global rules can account satisfactorily for the interaction of Quantifier Movement, Agreement, and Pronominalization in French. It is argued that an adequate treatment involves rules that enlarge networks of coreference in the course of syntactic derivations. Linguistic analogs of logical variables must be pres...

Thesis (Ph. D.--Linguistics)--University of California, San Diego, 1971. Vita: leaf vii. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 260-263). Photocopy.