Faculty
Participants
Line Brandt, University of California, San Diego
Natalie Cigankova, University of Latvia
Vito Evola, University of Palermo
Lise Lyng Falkenberg, University of Southern Denmark
Laura Feldt, University of Copenhagen
Maurizio Gagliano, University of Bologna
Pierre Gander, Lund University
Monica Gonzalez-Marquez, Cornell University
Anders Soegaard, University of Copenhagen
Michael Kimmel, University of Vienna
Irene Mittelberg, Cornell University
Francisco Peireira, University of Coimbra
Paul Sambre, LESSIUS Hogeschool Antwerp/University of Antwerp UFSIA
Hedvig Gyde Thomsen, Copenhagen University
Introduction
The summer school was on blending theory, a theory of conceptual integration
by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (see, for instance, their book "The Way We Think")
In the summer school, the aim was to show how blending theory can be applied to
various contexts, such as literature and computer interfaces, as well as
giving a better understanding of blending theory itself. The school included
lectures as well as workshops and exercises. PhD students were encouraged to
present their work.
Day by day overview and comments
Topic: Narrative context: blending in literature
Margaret Freeman presented a blending analysis of an untitled poem by Emily Dickinson ("The Luxury to apprehend...") and showed that by using blending theory, meanings before not considered by literary critics can surface. Freeman talked about poetic creation versus poetic comprehension. She said: "Blending theory is an elegant theory for creativity". She concluded that some elements of poetry are not yet handled by blending theory, such as rhythm, sound, which need to be explored.
Monica Gonzalez-Marquez presented the lyrics to a latin song with the translated title of "Her and him" for subsequent blending analysis later in the summer school.
Guest lecture by Robert E. MacLaury (University of Pennsylvania)
MacLaury gave an overview of vantage theory, which is a model of categorization. He focused on applying the theory to colour categorization in various cultures and languages, but also showed how the model can account for forms of addressing and deixis.
Topic: Blending in Interaction
Seana Coulson gave and introduction to blending theory and showed how it could be applied to an example of talk from a radio station.
Gitte Rasmussen gave a short introduction to Conversational Analysis. Anders Hougaard showed how Conversational Analysis can be extended with blending theory. Analysis was made of a telephone conversation from the Watergate affair between Colson and Hunt.
Line Brandt presented a blending theory analysis of a segment from a TV show focusing on the metaphor "digging your own grave".
Irene Mittelberg presented PhD work on cognitive models of grammar. She showed gesture data on language teachers' metaphorical gestures of grammar concepts.
Topic: Blending in Grammar
Todd Oakley presented his theory of attention for blending theory. It is an important area that is missing in blending theory, he stated. The theory, drawn together from knowledge in various fields such as psychology and neuroscience, was very sketchy and provided a heuristic and a vocabulary rather than a proper theory.
Anders Soegaard presented PhD work on nominal compounding in Mandarin Chinese.
Small group work on examples. Our group worked with an example with language use were an animal was blended with machines (or possibly toys) ("Snake is broken").
Chris Sinha gave a lecture on the concept of emergence, with background from biology and philosophy of science. The aim was to give a ground for the emergence concept in blending theory.
Topic: Computers and Interfaces
Tom Rohrer lectured about how blending analysis can be applied to computer interfaces. The participants analysed, using blending theory, an example in the form of a web commercial banner graphic. Rohrer gave some general hints for how to start making a blending analysis: 1) Brainstorm a list of lexical, visual, etc. items in the example to be analysed 2) Label some input spaces
Paul Sambre presented his PhD work on analysis of copula using cognitive linguistics (with definitions of the internet from magazines as corpus).
Seana Coulson gave a lecture on cognitive artifacts. She showed how a blending analysis can help in the analysis of cognitive artifacts (various lab equipment in an EEG lab).
Vito Evola presented PhD work on blending the erotic and the religious in mystical literature, with examples from The Song of Solomon.
Maurizio Gagliano presented his PhD work: Adapting Kant's schemas and Neisser's model of perception for a model of conceptual blending.
Topic: Methodology
Monica Gonzalez-Marquez played the latin song and participants attempted a blending analysis of the musical content and the lyrics.
Monica Gonzalez-Marquez presented experimental work on embodiment. Using portable and natural stimulus material (no computers), she aims at demonstrating, with high ecological validity, the psychological reality of image schemata.
Margaret Freeman gave a condensed talk about what readers do when understanding poetry. She illustrated inferences of varying complexity with examples from research on primates. No primates could spontaneously do a "systems mapping" inference, and according to her, neither could people she had tested either, with some execptions. But, she stated, people can learn how to do these complex mapping, necessary to understand poetry fully, so there is hope.
Special issues and questions discussed