James W. Underhill Université de Grenoble Meaning, Language, and Mind: An Interview with Mark Turner June 2001 James W. Underhill (JU): For a long time, metaphor was considered to be simply one of a number of rhetcrical figures or tropes which were used for special effect in speech, and poets were thought to be their undisputed masters. Philosophers tended to follow Plato in not trusting metaphor, considering it to be atool used by the sophist to bewitch and mislead the naive listener. In any case, few philosophers have followed Aristotle’s more tempered view that metaphor can be auseful pedagogical tool as long as both the user and the listener are aware that they are engaged in using figurative language. In recent years, however, the status of metaphor in intellectual debate has been radically revised. Since the 1970s, scholars from various academic disciplines have placed metaphor at the center of debates on literature, language, philosophy, and cognitive science. Among the philosophers, Derrida and de Man have argued that rhetoric is inescapable. According to them, the metaphors of philosophers’ discourse can no longer be treated as having a decorative function; rather their metaphors structure and shape their discourse. Certain linguists have also taken up the idea that metaphor is far more fundamental and pervasive. In 1985, for example, the editors of The Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Wolf Paprotté and René Driven, chose the title The Ubiquity of Metaphor when they included, in their 29" volume, articles from psychologists trying to determine at what age the child’s mind begins to master metaphor and articles from linguists looking at the relationship between metaphor and word formation (for example, we arrive at dragonfly by metaphoric reference to both dragons and flies). Geoffrey Leech, the English linguist, in his Semantics (1974/1981), considered metaphor not as a peripheral issue, but rather as a fundamental form of semantic transfer (214-19) that can allow us to make what he calls a “conceptual fusion, in his example from an Anglo-Saxon poem, meer-hengest (sea-steed), in which a boat is considered metaphorically in terms of a horse. Perhaps one of the most interesting developments in the study of metaphor is the Lakoff-Johnson argument thata great deal of our language (and, consequently, our understanding of the world) is, in a certain way, “structured” by a series of proto-metaphors, underlying conceptual 700 Style: Volume 36, No. 4, Winter 2002Meaning, Language, and Mind: An Interview with Mark Turner 701 structures which are implied by the language that we use. Lakoff and Johnson argue, for example, that we can only understand the sentence “That’s an indefensible argument” in metaphoric terms, by referring to the underlying proto- metaphor: ARGUMENT IS WAR, which implies that there are attackers and defenders, territories to be defended and castles to be assailed, etc. They argue that another proto-metaphor, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, underlies numerous everyday expressions and phrases. We might, for example, think of “Our relationship is really going places,” “Our relationship has come to a standstill,” “You and me are going nowhere.” The idea that proto-metaphors form a basic cognitive structure to which we often refer without thinking in everyday language can be used to reinterpret much of our speech. “You're wasting my time!” could be reinterpreted using the Lakoff and Johnson hypothesis as being structured along the lines of a fundamental premise: TIME IS MONEY. It is only because we can count money and measure time, then superimpose counting on measuring, that the idea of wasting time becomes intelligible in terms of wasting money. There is, according to Lakoff and Johnson, something very useful in perceiving and organizing the world in terms of proto-metaphors. Our metaphors highlight aspects or facets of something, allowing us to describe something unfamiliar or obscure in terms of something that we know well. The problem is that metaphors and proto-metaphors not only highlight, but also hide aspects of a thing. Love may share some characteristics with a journey. There is a beginning. We might feel a great drive pushing us in some direction. Events and incidents might be understood in terms of obstacles, etc. Similarly, some arguments might be conducted in terms of wars. Some people do seem to attack others in debate, Some defend themselves. Others surrender. Often academic debates do (sadly) turn into tournaments with “winners” and “losers.” But are all arguments wars? Is the idea of debate not rather founded on the sincere desire to achieve a mutually enriching exchange between two people with different ways of seeing the world? And does much of our rhetorical language (derived from the proto-metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR) not rather mislead us when it encourages us to conceive of discussion in combative terms? The proto-metaphors of which Lakoff and Johnson speak can, then, be considered as cognitive blue-prints for the patterns which partially organize our way of thinking about our relation to the world, to others and to ideas. That is no doubt why they called the book in which they exposed their premise Metaphors We Live By. (The idea that we live in accordance with these metaphors is entirely lost in the French title: Métaphores dans la vie quotidienne.) ‘The idea that proto-metaphors induce us to conceive ideas in certain partially predetermined ways inevitably has political repercussions. Much of our journalistic rhetoric is couched in proto-metaphors that encourage us to think in terms of enemies, allies, victims, and aggressors. The Lakoff-Johnson premise is702 James W, Underhill not without consequences for cultural studies either. What do our proto-metaphors show about us and our culture? Do other languages share our proto-metaphors? Can people from a Brazilian jungle understand the idea of “wasting someone's if they wear no watches and have no money but practice a form of barter instead? Similarly, would many cultures not rather insist on the permanence and unchanging nature of love (as many of our poets do) rather than considering it in terms of a trajectory or journey’? Since the Lakoff and Johnson book appeared in 1980, a great deal of work has followed on, extending and exploring the basic idea that metaphor is a fundamental part of the way we structure our understanding of the world. Mark Turner, of the University of Maryland, USA, is the author of numerous books on metaphor and what has come to be known as “cognitive poetics.” He has kindly agreed to be interviewed by me. Could I begin by asking you, Professor Turner, to explain what is meant by “cognitive poetics”? MT: Human beings do many surprising things that members of other species do not do, or at least do not do at the human level, In particular, human beings have an amazing ability to innovate and to manipulate culture to support innovation, This ability for innovation is evident in art, religion, science, the development of cultures, dress, refined tool use, and also language. It is quite difficult to pinpoint the source of this ability to innovate. But if you look at the genetic evidence and the paleontological evidence and some other sorts of evidence, it seems likely that these abilities were not available to the earlier versions of what we call anatomically modern human beings. Anatomically modern human beings seem to have been around for 150 or 200 thousand years. But about 50 thousand years ago, give or take, human beings made a spectacular advance. They became cognitively modern as well as anatomically modern. And these cognitively modern human beings seem to have swamped out or killed off all the other Eurasian branches. In any event, the cognitively modern human beings took over. Now, of course, we are all cognitively modern human beings. That does not mean that we all share the same conceptual structures — obviously, these can vary widely from culture to culture. But it does seem to mean that we all share a set of basic mental operations, however much those mental operations lead to different cultural products in different cultures. Cognitive poetics, as I use the term, is the attempt to explore the working of our cognitively modern mental operations as they play out in what we feel to be artistic or aesthetic behavior, with perhaps some special emphasis on their relation to symbolic material anchors such as voice, gesture, writing, visual representations, “musical” sound waves, dress, and the body in “dance.” What kind of mind must we have for a “poetics” of human thought and action to be possible? JU: Joe Grady makes a defense of the Aristotelian idea that metaphor can imply a fundamental resemblance between two things. “She is as sweet as a rose!” might be interpreted as highlighting the pleasing odor of both the girl and theMeaning, Language, and Mind: An Interview with Mark Turner 703 flower, perhaps their shared delicacy and fragility. In slightly less flattering and perhaps less “poetic” terms, “You eat like a pig!” is also, quite obviously, based on the idea of similarity. Isn’t this the traditional idea of metaphor? That there is a similarity. What reserves do.contemporary scholars have concerning this idea and why does Grady feel the need to come to its defense? MT: Analogy, along with its ever-present twin disanalogy, is one kind of conceptual connection that is possible between what Gilles Fauconnier calls “mental spaces.” Analogy and disanalogy between mental spaces is frequently compressed to a relation of similarity and dissimilarity within a mental space. Mental spac we small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action. Mental spaces are very partial assemblies containing elements. They are structured by frames and cognitive models. They are interconnected, and can be modified as thought and discourse unfold. Mental spaces can be used generally to model dynamical mappings in thought and language. The list of conceptual connections we routinely construct between mental spaces includes: Change Identity Time Space Cause-effect Part-whole Representation Role Analogy Property Category Intentionality Counterfactual When Lakoff and Johnson wrote Metaphors We Live By, they were exceptionally concerned to do away with the traditional idea that similarity accounted for metaphor. They pointed out that basic conceptual metaphors like MORE IS UP, expressed in phrases like “The stock market rose,” cannot be explained as matters of similarity, since there do not seem to be any objective features shared by the ascent of a physical object and the change in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Grady’s superb work had as one of its initial purposes to restore Similarity to its proper, if limited, place as a possible conceptual connector in metaphoric understanding. Actually, Lakoff and Johnson had already acknowledged it as such, especially in their discussion of image-metaphors: “He's a bean-pole” expresses an image-metaphor that depends absolutely on the similarity of height and thinness between the pole and the person. Grady’s more fundamental and impressive achievement was to show that there are certain704 James W. Underhill metaphors, what he calls primary experience metaphors, that depend upon a correlation between two domains that arises inevitably during early ontogenetic experience. For example, there is a primary experiential correlation between being upright and being able to perform actions. This basic correlation develops ontogenetically into the basic metaphor VIABILITY IS UPRIGHTNESS, which can be used even when there is no experiential correlation, as in “The computer is up.” Grady gives a similar analysis for the primary experience metaphor KNOWING IS SEEING, studied by Eve Sweetser as an aspect of the much more systematic metaphor of THE MIND IS A BODY MOVING IN SPACE. Incidentally, Joe Grady has collaborated recently with Seana Coulson and Todd Oakley — three very insightful young theorists — on the question of just what counts as a metaphor, and the way in which metaphoric conceptions arise through a process Gilles Fauconnier and I call conceptual integration. The name of the article is “Conceptual Blending and Metaphor,” and a link to it can be found on the blending Web site: blending.stanford.edu. JU: In your own work, you investigate both language and literature in order to demonstrate what both can tell us about the way the mind works. In Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (1987), you argue, “Imagination is not unfettered; it is governed by principles. These principles are automatic and below the level of consciousness. The job here is to show what some of these principles are” (16). This is basically the task you give yourself in this book. Investigating the metaphoric systems (or what is more traditionally termed allegory) of Milton (among other poets), you explore the constructs that take shape through thinking in terms of “kinship.” You ask, what do we know about kinship, how does this knowledge give rise to basic kinship metaphors, and how do these metaphors combine with that knowledge and with each other to give rise to the basic inference patterns we use in inventing and understanding kinship metaphors? The book is devoted to answering these three questions, but could you briefly explain here some of the answers you find for these questions? MT: I wrote Death is the Mother of Beauty because | was intrigued that human beings seem to be able to put together very different concepts in ways that strike us as powerful and apt rather than exotic and surreal, and I wanted to explore this characteristic human ability. To do that, I thought it might be wise to choose a particular laboratory, and I settled on an exploration of the ways in which we connect concepts of kinship relations to other kinds of concepts. Kinship relations, after all, are a central conceptual domain for all human beings, although different cultures configure that conceptual domain quite differently. I found that, on the one hand, people can make very unusual connections involving kinship relations, and, on the other, there are some connections that are extremely familiar and continually expressed in the English language and other Western languages. One of the things I found that interested me most was that these connections followed constraints. For example, we connect the parent-child relation very widely to cause-effectMeaning, Language, and Mind: An Interview with Mark Turner 705 relations in essentially any conceptual domain, and we do so according to constraints rather than according to fixed linkages. We can say that “age is the mother of wisdom” or that “humility is the mother of wisdom.” Many things can be the mother of wisdom. But these connections seem to follow governing principles. For example, the scene of birth has certain kinds of elements and a certain event shape: first there is one thing, then there are two, and there is a sharp individuation between them, and the birth is relatively sudden even if the gestation is not, and both abide for a significant amount of time, and so on. When we connect progeneration to causation, we do so according to these topological features. We do not say “She is the mother of the basket she just sank” or, if a cloud shifts slightly into a different form, “That cloud is the mother of its present form.” There are very many such kinship expressions that would sound very weird to us because they contravene various governing principles. This line of inquiry into constraints produced, when I worked with George Lakoff on More than Cool Reason, an analysis of generic-level connections that operate by constraints (an example is the familiar set of connections known as EVENTS ARE ACTIONS, as in “Death is stalking me”), It also produced what came to be called the Invariance Hypothesis, which is essentially aclaim that metaphoric connections follow a certain governing principle having to do with cognitive topology. That line of inquiry has now been pursued very much further in studies of governing principles on conceptual integration which Gilles Fauconnier and I have published. JU; One very interesting point you make is that our ideas of kinship bonds exclude certain metaphors. You give some amusing examples to prove your point. However free we might like to feel imagination and metaphoric fantasy is, most people would probably agree with you that “Love is the father of purity” is not a likely association, Why is that? MT: We need to distinguish two sorts of constraints. One kind of constraint has to do with constraints on the basic mental operations of conceptual connection. Another kind of constraint has to do with cultural frames of knowledge. Here, we are dealing with the second kind. Why can Love not be the Father of Purity? Maybe it can now, but until recently such an expression was extremely unlikely in the language. I found thousands and thousands of kinship metaphors in the language (in the days before one could use a computer to search for them —I had boxes and boxes of little index cards), and I never found one like this. Nurturant love and admirable purity seemed to be associated with mothers rather than fathers, so I never found anything like “love is the father of purity.” JU: Can you offer any more such unlikely examples? MT: Absolutely. On the one hand, there are many expressions thatare unlikely because they contravene topology constraints. So Betsy Ross may be the mother of the American flag, but I am not the father of my beard, | am not the father of the home run I just hit, Lam not the father of a hiccup. On the other hand, there are all those expressions that are unlikely because they run counter to cultural stereotypes.706 James W. Underhill For at least a long period of time in English, it would have been remarkable to say “Meekness is the father of contentment,” although itis perfectly clear what it would mean if we could say it. JU: You show that the metaphors we use, accept, and inventreflect the way we understand our kinship bonds and the roles that each member is “supposed” to play Interpreting metaphors involving daughters you claim, ““Daughter’ has the Strongest connotation of submissiveness and dependency, of passivity and inaction; she is not an individuated socially active agent. A daughter is an object of wooing. She is stereotypically graceful and beautiful” (Death is the Mother of Beauty 57). Could you give an example? MT: I givea long analysis of the passage in book two of Milton’s Paradise Lost in which Satan encounters Sin and Death. Sin is Satan's daughter. She is attractive and he has incestuous sex with her. She begins life graceful and beautiful. She stays submissive to Satan throughout. JU: “Son,” you say, can have strong connotations of activity and inheritance. Can you give an example? MT: Again, Milton gives us just that picture in Paradise Lost. Death is the son, and he is one of the strongest and most active characters you could meet. He also inherits this strength, resolve, and activity from his father, Satan. This passage actually gives us a very full introduction to the kinds of complexities we can see in conceptual connections involving kinship relations. Milton wishes to make an analogy about a theological complex including evil, sin, and death. Part of this analogy, the personification of evil as Satan, is already conventional and available for Milton’ s use. The source domain he chooses for this analogy is kinship relations, and his chief motivation for choosing it is that he is dealing with the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Milton presents an infernal version of this trinity, Milton's theological space includes evil, disobedience, sin, death, and their relations, as well as the psychology of the prototypical sinner confronted with spiritual death. Milton’s kinship space includes progeneration and kinship relations, especially the role father. He supplements this standard kinship space with yet a third influencing space, which is itself a pre-existing blend, of the birth of Athena from the brow of Zeus. In Milton’s conception, Satan conceives of the concept of sin; a fully-grown woman, Sin, leaps from his brow. Satan is attracted to sin/Sin: he has sex with her, Although he does not know it at the time, his involvement with sin/Sin has a consequence, namely death—in the blend, Death is the male offspring of Satan’s incestuous union with Sin. The analogy with the Holy Trinity is clear: Satan corresponds to God, and both are Fathers. Sin corresponds to Christ, the redeemer; both Christ and Sin are offspring who further in some fashion their fathers’ work. Death corresponds to the Holy Ghost, who, we recall, is the Spiritus Sanctus, the breath that put life into Mary’s womb and that makes the human spirit immortal,Meaning, Language, and Mind: An Interview with Mark Turner 707 free of death. Milton adds something that has no analogy with the Holy Trinity: Death rapes his mother Sin, causing her to give birth to a small litter of allegorical monsters. After Satan has been sent to Hell and has determined to escape, he meets two characters at the gates of Hell who have been stationed there to prevent his exit. They are Sin and Death. But he does not recognize them. The principal mental spaces that contribute to this blended story—the kinship space and the theological space—correspond in some ways but not others. Milton draws from both of them, selectively. For example, he takes exclusively from the kinship space Sin’s intercession between Death and Satan—father and son—when they are on the brink of terrible combat. He takes exclusively from the theological space many central features, as follows. In the theological space, the cast of mind that goes with thrilling sin ignores the fact that mortality and spiritual death are sin’s consequences and is appalled to acknowledge them. Hence, in the blend, Sin is surprised to have conceived Death, and she finds her son odious. Next, in the theological space, mortality and spiritual death overshadow the appeal of sin and are stronger than sin; acknowledging death devalues sin; willful, sinful desires are powerless to stop this devaluation. Hence, in the blend, Sin is powerless to stop her horrible rape by Death. In the theological space, the fact of spiritual death-brings ceaseless remorse and anguish to the sinful mind, and the torments of hell bring eternal punishment. Hence, in the blend, the rape of Sin by Death produces monstrous offspring whose birth, life, actions, and relationship to their mother are impossible for the domain of human kinship: These yelling Monsters that with ceasless cry Surround me, as thou saw’st, hourly conceiv'd And hourly born, with sorrow infinite To me, for when they list, into the womb ‘That bred them they return, and howl and gnaw My Bowels, thir repast; then bursting forth Afresh with conscious terrors vex me round, That rest or intermission none I find, (Complete Poems, 251) Milton creates unobvious correspondences between the kinship space and the theological space. For example, he blends the less than stereotypical scenario of disliking a child with feeling horror at the fact of death. He blends the unusual scenario of a son raping a mother with the effect of death on sin. Perhaps most ingeniously, he blends the unusual medical frame of traumatic vaginal birth that physically deforms the mother, making her less attractive, with the way sin becomes less attractive once death is acknowledged as its outcome: At last this odious offspring whom thou seest Thine own begotten, breaking violent way Tore through my entrails, that with fear and pain Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew Transform'd. (250)708 James W. Underhill In his analogy between a family and a theological complex, Milton reforges the source influencing space as he forges the connections. He aggressively reconstrues that source to recruit marginal but not impossible structure such as incest, the incestuous conception of a son upon a daughter, the mother’s finding the son odious, the medical frame of a disfiguring vaginal birth, and the impregnating rape of the mother by the son. He also recruits to the blended space some structure from other, lesser influencing spaces, and this structure helps the blend to extend the source in ways that are impossible for the source itself, as follows. Under pressure to find a source analogue for mental conception, he recruits to the blend from the story of Zeus and Athena the birth of the daughter from the brow of the father. Under pressure to find a source analogue for the many vile consequences of sin, he recruits the birth of a litter of vile monsters as the product of the conjunction of sin and death. Under pressure to find a source analogue for the effect of sinning on the sinner, he invents the ability of these monsters to crawl back into the womb and gnaw on their mother’s bowels. Under pressure to find a source analogue for the fact that individual acts of sin take place because of the existence of sin in the world and its place in the sinful soul, he invents a way for the offspring of sin to depend on her for nourishment even though they have been weaned. This conceptual symphony may look antiquated to us now, and that may be the reason we are able to inspect it dispassionately, but itis important to remember that not only was it intelligible and compelling for Milton and many of his readers, it was also absolutely serious. JU: “Brother,” you say, can connote activity and strength. When beliefs are shared, it is brothers who share them. You do, however, point out that this situation is changing and that “sisterhood” is becoming more powerful. What does that show about changes in society and the transfiguration of shared metaphoric constructs’? MT: Again, it is important to remember that basic mental operations always play out over cultural frames of knowledge. The basic mental operations are universal to cognitively modern human beings. But the products of those operations, and the cultural frames over which they operate, can vary and change. JU: The work you have done on the question of kinship metaphors should be of interest not only to linguists and literary critics but also to sociologists and anthropologists. We would assume that cultures that have different kinship bonds would engender different kinship metaphors. Inversely, the study of kinship metaphors could be used to reveal the implicit (often unspoken) foundations upon which kinship bonds are built. These are questions for which we have no clear answers at the moment, but perhaps it would be revealing to compare metaphors in the poetry of different languages. We might also consider, for example, the resistance that languages show to accepting certain metaphors in translation. Let’s take your example from Milton of the complex allegory that is constructed around the idea that Sin, the daughter of Satan couples with her son, Death. This presents serious problems forMeaning, Language, and Mind: An Interview with Mark Turner 709 the French translators of Milton, since in French “Death”, (La Mort) is feminine, whilst “Sin” (le péché) is masculine. German translators have a much easier job since “Death” is already masculine in their language (Der Tod), whilst “Sin” is already feminine (die Siinde). Milton constructs allegoric structures based upon kinship associations, but in languages that already divide their nouns into different genders, abstract nouns like death, sin, love, friendship, absence, etc. are already partially personified by their gender. Indeed it would be interesting to see how differences emerge between languages with binary gender divisions (masculine-feminine), like French, and languages with tri-partite gender divisions (masculine-feminine-neuter), like German, Russian, and Czech. It would also be interesting to see how writers find ways to resist the gender associations that the language almost seems to impose. upon the way they conceive the world around them. The modern Czech poet, Frantisek Halas, gives one interesting example of resisting gender associations when he uses the Latin-based term for moon (luna) instead of the usual word (mésic), in the line “Luna se svlékla k pilnoci” (The moon undressed towards midnight.) Here luna is feminine, whilst mésic is masculine. A manly moon stripping off towards midnight apparently didn’t fit with the lyrical world that Halas wanted to evoke. Can you tell me if there has been much work on proto-metaphors and kinship metaphors in comparative literature and comparative linguistics? MT: Death is the Mother of Beauty considers literary texts written ina number of Western languages. Work on cross-linguistic basic metaphors has actually been quite an industry since about 1990. Rafael Nufiez and Eve Sweetser for example, worked on this question in working in their article, “Spatial Embodiment of Temporal Metaphors in Aymara: Blending Source-Domain Gesture with Speech.” (Other relevant names can be found on the blending Web site, http:// blending.stanford.edu or on the other Web sites that are quoted at the end of the interview. ) JU: You published Death is the Mother of Beauty in 1987. What have you been working on since? MT; Right now Lam writing a book with Gilles Fauconnier. The book is titled The Way We Think. In the study of cognitively modern human beings, there is a tendency to pick out one of the innovative human behaviors, like tool use or the forming of social alliances or language. Any one of these innovative human behaviors can be nominated as the one singularity that made all the others possible. But in The Way We Think, Fauconnier and I take the view that all of these exceptional human abilities are linked. They all precipitated from the same evolutionary development. They all come from the same cognitive root. Because the new innovative abilities come on the scene quickly during our phylogenetic descent, it is easy to imagine that the underlying cause was quick, that something changed the human brain radically and rapidly and so made all these new abilities710 James W. Underhill possible. We propose instead that the development was gradual but that once a certain stage of the development was reached, these various innovative abilities all precipitated. We propose that over evolutionary time there was a more or less gradual increase in the cognitive ability to do what we call conceptual integration. Clearly other animal species have some of this ability. When, in anatomically modern human beings, the ability to do conceptual integration advanced to a certain stage — the stage of being able to do “double-scope” conceptual integration — then these innovative feats all become possible. So, the development of the capacity was gradual, but the arrival of the major cognitive and behavioral effects was relatively sudden. That is, the effects arise in cultural time rather than evolutionary time; they take only tens of thousands of years. The Way We Think analyzes the nature of conceptual integration, its principles and mechanisms, and concentrates on the stage that makes human beings “cognitively modern,” that is, on the stage of “double-scope” integration. Double-scope integration integrates two mental assemblies, two notions, two thoughts that conflict in their basic conceptual organizations, because they are based on conflicting frames or conflicting identities. The result of this integration is a new conceptual array, a “blend,” that has a new organizing structure and cmergent meaning of its own. In “double-scope” integration, there are two input mental spaces that we typically keep quite separate, but there is also the invention of a blend that draws crucially on both of them. For example, you might think that it is indispensable that you not confuse yourself with another person. But, in fact, human beings are exceptionally good at making elaborate conceptual constructions involving themselves and other people. They say “If I were you I'd quit my job because if I were you I’d have your courage”; “If I were you I'd quit my job but you won’t because you’ re timid”; “If I were you I'd quit my job but then I’m independently wealthy so I wouldn’t need it”; “If were you I'd quit my job because you have another one”; “If I were you I'd quit my job because / have another one”; “If I were you I'd quit my job because your beloved boss has another job offer and he is going to leave.” Notice how all of these “If T were you” expressions receive different projections from the /and the you. The resulting blend does not erase our knowledge of the difference between “T’ and “you,” but itis not merely a weird, escapist fantasy, either. On the contrary, these blended conceptions are put together for important purposes such as making real choices. When a man says to a woman who earlier in life declined to become pregnant, “If I were you, I would have done it,” we do not reject the blend out of hand. Even though the man cannot do it and the woman did not do it, we put together a blended space which has the appropriate past status, and in that space there is an individual with the abilities and situation of the woman but the judgment of the man. In this space, there is a pregnancy and probably a child, Talk about emergent structure! This blended space is meant to provide insight into the reality of the man and the woman, and it does. Sometimes, of course, the blend is a joke, but that does not mean that it is any less serious as an object of study. Here is a jokeMeaning, Language, and Mind: An Interview with Mark Turner m1 example: There is a Swiss chocolate called “Toblerone.” Toblerone chocolate is in the shape of a pyramid. It comes in three different sizes. Well, the motto of Toblerone is “Toblerone inspires the World.” There is an ad for Toblerone in which we see the pyramids of Gizeh with the words “Ancient Tobleronism?” Down at the bottom of the ad, the Toblerone chocolates are arrayed exactly like the pyramids. Itis probably just an accident that Toblerone and the monuments of Gizeh have the shape of a pyramid. It is just luck that four Toblerone chocolates, one large, one small, and two medium, can be arrayed to resemble the four Egyptian pyramids in the photograph. The enjoying of Swiss chocolate and the monumental burial pyramids at Gizeh are radically different conceptual arrays. But human beings can take the initial connection between the two frames provided by the fact that there are pyramids in both of them, and build an amazingly innovative and complicated new conception. In this new blend, the modern chocolates are the cause for the ancient pyramids. They are the object in whose honor the memorial pyramids were built. The relationships between the wo spaces — of Toblerone and the Egyptian pyramids — are compressed. There is time compression, putting the modern chocolates and the ancient pyramids into the same moment. In the blend, the pyramids were invented because the chocolates were already there. In the blend, we have a new frame of ancient monuments honoring the best food. We encounter such an ad as we are flipping negligently through a magazine and absorb it in a second, The conceptual work involved in absorbing itis exceptionally difficult, but seems to us entirely easy, even enjoyable. Human beings have no difficulty assembling these sorts of conceptual integration networks. We have no difficulty doing very elaborate integrations over different identities and over different frames to produce innovative identities or innovative frames that did not previously exist. These sorts of examples point to one of the central problems in cognitive science, which is this: at the moment, cognitive science has very little explanation of where new meaning could come from, of how new meaning could arise through cognitive operations. There are some proposals. Evolutionary psychology, for instance, suggests that we have certain frames that have been built into our psychology through adaptation. The idea is that since it is adaptive to recognize “this is a predator,” natural selection has arranged for direct genetic instruction for that recognition. That idea is fine, as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. It offers a hypothesis that could account for only a very few meanings, such as “I am in pain.” These are meanings that are species-wide and built in by adaptation. It cannot provide an explanation how new meanings can arise in cultural time rather than evolutionary time, and tells us more or less nothing about the kinds of meaning thatcan vary sharply from culture to culture. There is another proposal for how new meaning could ari: alled the theory of schemas. It is a branch of complex adaptive systems theory. The theory goes roughly like this: you encounter regularities in your environment and you have the ability to extract statistical patterns over those regularities and to form a compression of those patterns, a712 James W. Underhill compression that you then expand when you use it in an actual situation. For example, obviously, you do not have a naturally selected, genetically instructed frame for tipping in a restaurant. But perhaps you have a lot of experience, directly or through cultural mediations like novels and TV shows, of restaurants, and you gradually extract through statistical means a compressed schema of restaurants, a schema that you can expand to include restaurants you have never seen. The theory of schemas is interesting, but obviously it offers no explanation of the invention of meanings that are not already part of the culture, meanings that are not already available to be experienced and so compressed into a schema. To acquire the schema for restaurant, there have to be restaurants in your experience. You must see them or read about them. You must already be able to experience them if you are to extract their regularities. The theory of schemas, then, is a theory about how you might acquire meanings that your culture has elaborately built for you. But obviously, the theory of schemas offers no explanation of how new meaning arises, meaning that is not already available in the environment, and yet creating new meaning is just what human beings do all the time. Cognitive science at the moment recognizes that the emergence and descent of meaning are fundamental problems. How could human beings know meanings? How could things be meaningful to us? And how can new meanings arise that are not already part of the environment? The Way We Think offers a hypothesis about how new meaning can arise, and more, how itcan be intelligibly managed as it is arising, and how itcan be compressed and disseminated, That's what we are working on, JU: Could you tell me what exactly Gilles Fauconnier has brought to the field of cognitive poetics? MT: Gilles Fauconnier is the exceptionally brilliant and widely influential father of the theory of mental spaces, which was very fully developed by him, and later by his students, before he and I began to work together. But mental space theory was missing the entire theory of conceptual integration. This is surprising, actually. There are many sections of Mental Spaces that now, in retrospect, seem positively to cry out for analysis according to the theory of conceptual blending. Fauconnier would agree with that assessment. JU; You are in Paris for several weeks, giving a series of lectures at the Collége de France, Could you briefly explain what you are lecturing on? MT: These lectures are available on the web, at http://bepress.com/casbs and at http://turner.stanford.edu. Let me give you an example of what | am talking about, It’s a passage froma poem by William Butler Yeats, the first three stanzas of “Among School Children”: Among School Children: L walk through the long schoolroom questioning; ‘A kind old nun in a white hood replies; ‘The children learn to cipher and to sing, To study reading-books and history,Meaning, Language, and Mind: An Interview with Mark Turner 713 To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way—the children’s eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling public man. I dream of a Ledaean body, bent Above a sinking fire, a tale that she Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event ‘That changed some childish day to tragedy -- Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent phere from youthful sympathy, Or else, to alter Plato's parable, Into the yolk and white of the one shell. And thinking of that fit of grief or rage Llook upon one child or t'other there And wonder if she stood so at that age-- For even daughters of the swan can share Something of every paddler’s heritage-- ‘And had that colour upon cheek or hair, ‘And thereupon my heart is driven wild: She stands before me as a living child, (The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 212-13) This poem prompts us to construct several mental spaces. In one mental space, there is the school girl. In another, there is the woman the man remembers. She tells a story about “some childish day” that took place in her youth. Her story sets up a third mental space, which has the childish day and has the young girl who would later become the grown woman at the fire, We are prompted to do some very imaginative work with these three mental spaces. First, we are to construct a mapping of analogy between the schoolgirl in the present and the other girl in the past. That girl in the past, did she resemble this schoolgirl in the present? That girl in the past, did she stand the way this schoolgirl stands? Did her cheeks or hair have the same color as the man sees in the schoolgirl in front of him? The passage provokes us to construct an analogy between the two girls. But then, we are provoked to integrate those two analogical girls into one identity. In the new, integrated mental space, which is called “the blend,” the girl whom the man sees is integrated with the girl in the past; the girl in the blend is in a way the woman the man remembers and also the girl he sees. The blend proves to be very powerful emotionally. He is transported. ‘The man speaking is not insane. He keeps several mental spaces separate and does not confuse them. He has the mental space for the schoolgirl, the mental space for the girl in the past, and the mental space for the woman. He is not confused. But he also constructs, mentally, another mental space, an integrating space, and that integrating space has power and meaning. In the integrating space, there is one girl, who is simultaneously the school girl before him and the girl from the past who later became the woman at the fire. Since, in the blend, this girl in the integrating space is the schoolgirl in the present, he can directly perceive the girl. But she is also the person from the past whom he loved. Consequently, by means of the blend, he714 James W. Underhill can look directly at the person from the past, and so be moved with a powerful emotion, an emotion that drives his heart wild. The language in this passage points to the conceptual integration of two different people. The man who speaks says, “She stands before me as a living child.” The word she here is taken from the space with the grown woman, but it can be used to pick out an element in the integrating space. That element is an integration of the present schoolgirl, the girl in the past, and the woman that girl in the past became. The present tense indicative form stands is possible only because in the integrating space she is present now. The word living points to the contrast between the girl in the blend and the woman whom the man remembers. This integration of the two different people is a “double-scope” or “multiple- scope” integration. It integrates different mental spaces that are strongly incompatible. There is a great clash between the mental frame for schoolgirl and the mental frame for lover or beloved. The integrating space receives selective projection from the mental space of the schoolgirl, from the mental space of the girl who became the woman at the fire, and from the mental space with the woman at the fire. JU; Can you explain some of the details of the mental operation of conceptual blending? MT; Let’s take the example we just considered. It reveals the main principles of the basic mental operation of conceptual integration. —Mapping between the mental spaces that are inputs to the blend. Conceptual integration always involves a mapping between input mental spaces. The mapping typically involves connections of identity, analogy, similarity, causality, change, time, intentionality, space, role, part-whole, or representation. In the case of the poem by Yeats, the mappings involve identity, analogy, time, and change. ~The second principle is selective projection. Different elements of the input spaces are projected to the blended space. In the poem by Yeuts, we take from the space with the schoolgirl her presence in the present moment, many of the features of her appearance, her public identity, and her public encounter with the “smiling public man who is sixty years old.” From the quite different space with the other girl in the past, we take her beauty, as well as the man’s keen interest in her because of her connection of identity with the woman. From the yet different space with the woman we take many things, especially the speaker’s emotional relationship to her. But there are also many elements in each of these spaces that we do not project into the blend. For example, we project the temporal moment from the space of the schoolgirl, but not from the other two spaces. —The third principle is emergent structure. Emergent structure in integrating spaces comes from three sources: composition, completion, and elaboration. Composition is putting together elements from different spaces. Completion is the fillimg in of partial patterns in the integrating space. The poem by Yeats gives us a clear case of completion. We all know the general conceptual frame in whichMeaning, Language, and Mind: An Interview with Mark Turner 715 someone suddenly perceives someone he longs to see. When, in the blend, the schoolgirl is integrated with the girl who grew to be the woman the speaker loved, we suddenly have a scene in which the speaker is seeing a girl and she is the person he loved. We complete this scene with our understanding of what happens when someone suddenly sees a person he longs to see. Elaborating the blended space occurs when we develop it according to its principles. JU; The autumn 1999 edition of Poetics Today is devoted to the question of metaphor, and the greater part of the articles are centered around either the Lakoff- Johnson concept of proto-metaphor or what has been termed the “Turner- Fauconnier” concept of “blending.” One thing that left me a little perplexed was an idea put forward by Monika Fludernik, Donald C. Freeman, and Margaret H. Freeman in their introduction to the edition, that metaphor was not going to be considered as a linguistic phenomenon, but rather as a mental phenomenon. How can we separate the two? Surely two of the strong points of the Lakoff-Johnson postulate were that language forms a part of our thought patterns and that mind and language are inextricable. Some linguists would argue that it is only with language that we come to think conceptually, that language learning, social interaction and personality formation are inseparable. In this sense, certain linguists will speak not about how children learn to talk but about how they learn to “mean,” the idea being that speaking and meaning are considered as one act. Doesn't the mind-language division presuppose a working model that is founded upon the idea of an active mind that “uses” language as some kind of tool. Metaphors based upon this utilitarian conception of language can often be found in linguistics, for example in “language use.” Benveniste, one of the most influential French linguists of the last fifty years, would argue, however, that we can’t conceive of language as a tool in the same way as we talk of a hammer or a wheel, since man invented the hammer and the wheel, whereas modern man, as an interactive member of a highly organized society, with a history and a culture, with a future and a past, is inconceivable without his language. Fauconnier’s book Mental Spaces seems, if | haven’ t misread it, to be working with a division between mind and language when he claims to be talking about the mind rather than language. Is such a claim justified, if most of his findings are based upon the study of language, and not on some kind of direct study of the mind which would be hard to imagine, if not in terms of surgical analysis of the “brain”? MT: | think the editors of the Poetics Today volume meant that metaphor would not be considered as a linguistic phenomenon only, which is a good thing. Most good thinkers, including Aristotle, have recognized that itis also a conceptual phenomenon. Lakoff, Johnson, and Fauconnier feel the need to announce their resistance to traditions of analytic philosophy and formal semantics that take “figurative language” to be a matter of word-play without analogue in cognition. On the contrary, they argue, the various phenomena we see in language derive from716 James W. Underhill the fact that cognition works in certain ways. All of these “cognitivists” would point out that the various phenomena of conceptual projection, mental space connection, and so on that we see expressed in language have analogues in other, non-linguistic areas of human behavior. JU: One striking difference between your own work and that of Lakoff and Johnson is that yours seems to be closer to a literary approach. Many of your examples are taken from the literary canon, from Milton, Blake, and Shakespeare, whilst many of Lakoff’s metaphors tend to come from everyday conversation. In the concluding paragraph of Death is the Mother of Beauty you argue, “As language and literature lead us to contemplate problems in human understanding, so the study of mind turns wisely for clues to the oldest and most abiding arts. This book derives from the dual nature of literature and the human mind as doors into each other. 1 hope it has demonstrated the indispensability of uniting our investigations of literature, semantics, and cognition. I believe the future of such a unification could be powerful, rich, and exciting” (196). The idea of literature leading to revelations about the mind, and of linguistic study leading to revelations about literature would obviously be interesting to many people. Nevertheless, don’t you see a danger of literary study being reduced toa part of cognitive science? On the back cover of your book, Lakoff says of it, “It shows that the study of the literary mind is an integral part of the study of the mind in general.” Isn’t there a danger that scholars who formerly tried to plumb the depths of Shakespeare’ s allegory, and to appreciate the expressive force and aesthetic genius of his metaphors will end up spending an equal part of their time and energy exploring dead metaphors and hackneyed expressions? Aren't we likely to end up working more on “son of a bitch” and “necessity is the mother of invention” than on Hamlet’s lines: “to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or “to sweat and grunt under a weary life”? MT: I hope not. Exploring the brain should help us to think about emotion and reason and consciousness. Figuring out what mechanisms are involved in perceiving color should tell us more, not less, about Vermeer. Looking into the basic mental operations that make us cognitively modern, far from taking us away from literature, should instead put us on the path toward understanding why it exists, and how it does what it does. Works Cited Fauconnier, Gilles. Mental Spaces. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985. Fludernik Monika, Donald C. Freeman, and Margaret H. Freeman. “Metaphor and Beyond: An Introduction.” Poetics Today. Ed. Meir Sternberg, Autumn edition, Durham: Duke UP, 1999.Meaning, Language, and Mind: An Interview with Mark Turner TIT Grady, Joseph, Todd Oakley, and Seana Coulson. “Conceptual Blending and Metaphor” in Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, 1999. Ed. Gerard Steen and Raymond Gibbs Jr. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 101-24. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Leech, Geoffrey. Semantics, London: Penguin, 1974, 2" edition, 1981. Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1957, book 2, lines 759ff, page 251. Nunez , Rafael, and Eve Sweetser. “Spatial Embodiment of Temporal Metaphors in Aymara: Blending Source-Domain Gesture with Speech. “ Proceedings of the 7th Int’l Cognitive Linguistics Conference. 249-50. Paprotté, Wolf and René Dirven, The Ubiquity of Metaphor: Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Current Issues, in Linguistic Theory, Volume 29, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1985. Sweetser, Eve. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Turner, Mark. Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. ——: The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. —— (With Gilles Fauconnier). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillian, 1956. 212-13. Readers will find further information on studies on metaphor, cognitive poetics and blending on the following Web sites: http://blending.stanford.edu hup://www2.be.edu/~richarad/Ieb/home.htm|Copyright © 2003 EBSCO Publishing