Talk at the Cognition and Poetics Conference, Osnabrück

Fecha de publicación: 29-jul-2013 19:05:15

CAP 2013, April 25-27

The Poetics of the Timeline Blend

This presentation compares the poetic use of the timeline blend (Coulson & Pagán Cánovas in press) in lyric imagery with data from different modalities and types of discourse: graphical objects, time-space metaphors from newspapers and the web, and psycholinguistic experiments.

When instantiated graphically, the timeline serves as a material anchor (Hutchins 2005) in a conceptual integration network (Fauconnier & Turner 2002) representing partial cognitive models of time, lines, objects, and a hybrid model, or conceptual blend. Conventional sets of mappings, such as the classic space→time projection, are best viewed not as determining the interpretation of timelines, but rather as providing soft constraints that help guide meaning construction (Fauconnier & Turner 2008). This allows blends such as the timeline to present a wide variety of emergent properties.

These novel features are coherent with the timeline’s generic structure of mappings and integrations, but they also incorporate the motivations of the context. For example, a poetic timeline symbolizing our existence can consist of candles that gradually burn out, one by one, producing strong emotional effects (Pagán Cánovas & Jensen, forthcoming). The poetic exploitation of the entrenched cognitive and cultural pattern provides crucial data for understanding what aspects of the timeline can be more salient, as well as for analyzing how affective temporal meanings are constructed. The presentation will also provide data from reader-response experiments indicating that readers are guided by the timeline when visualizing some time metaphors from poetic texts.

References

Coulson, S. & Pagán Cánovas, C. (Forthcoming) Understanding timelines: conceptual metaphor and conceptual integration. Cognitive Semiotics, Special issue on Conceptual Metaphor Theory.

Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. (2002). The way we Think. Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. (2008). Rethinking Metaphor. In Ray Gibbs (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hutchins, E. (2005). Material anchors for conceptual blends. Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 1555-1577.

Pagán Cánovas, C. & Jensen, M. Forthcoming. Anchoring Time-Space Mappings and their Emotions: The Timeline Blend in Poetic Metaphors. Language and Literature.