Conceptual Blending (by invitation, section 'Major concepts/approaches')

Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory (1994, 1998, 2002) accounts for creative meaning construction. It posits that we dynamically generate new conceptual configurations and draw inferences by selectively mapping and integrating elements from different ‘mental spaces’— partial cognitive models representing ontologically diverse scenarios (e.g. real, fictitious, counterfactual). This chapter presents the theory’s origins and core principles, and its view of language as prompting often surprisingly complex backstage conceptual operations. I discuss the establishment of conceptual mappings across spaces, the architecture of various types of blending networks, and the creation of emergent structure in the blend. Blending seeks to achieve human-scale understanding by compressing the complex and diffuse into intelligible novel conceptual packages. Far from rare, blending underlies everyday conversation, rhetoric, humor, and multimodal communication, as well as art and reasoning. The chapter concludes by affirming blending as a central cognitive process essential for analyzing language, creativity, and overall cognition.