On the afternoon of March 3, 2018, Prof. Mark Turner from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) delivered a lecture on “Integration and Language” at the invitation of School of International Studies (SIS). The lecture was hosted by Dr. Esther Pascual from the SIS.
On the basis of the nature of language, Prof. Turner put forward that to understand language was to understand the interacted system of form and meaning, of which what mattered most was not the ways of naming objects, but the integration of form and meaning. To make relevant concepts clearer, he cited a series of stories to show that people will automatically map the form of what they see or hear to objects in the world when they try to understand pictures and languages, thus giving the image or word a corresponding meaning. In this process, the human brain frequently matches and integrates all forms and meanings while compressing external conditions such as time and space in mental space, which distinguishes human beings from other animals.
After a brief introduction to relevance principle in Blending Theory, Prof. Turner listed a dozen complex grammatical structures that can be interpreted with this theory and analyzed them with integrated network diagrams, namely, possessive network, diversity and unity, conditional sentences, compound nouns, the caused-motion construction, resultative constructions, ditransitive constructions and so on. Based on these detailed explanations and examples, he summarized that as a frame-style mental space network, Conceptual Blending Network was an important part of Conceptual Blending Theory, which was of great significance to our understanding of language and cognition of deconstruction.
At the end of the lecture, students and teachers raised questions and had a warm interaction with Prof. Turner in blending theory, mental space, frame-style network, and so on.
Institute of Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Team of Big Data PLUS Language Universals and Cognition, Zhejiang University
