rhinos, and lions—is it used literally (if a trifle unconventionally)? We can sidestep this question, while still arriving at an acceptable interpretation, by viewing the compound as a blend, in which the space of paleontology is integrated with the space of hunting to produce a new kind of hunter:prey relationship, one in which the hunter is temporally separated from his prey by 65 million years. That these hunters never actually see their prey in the flesh is beside the point, since metonymy allows us to conflate these long-dead dinosaurs with their skeletons. Indeed, Fauconnier and Turner [2002] argue that a common side-effect of conceptual blending is metonymic tightening, whereby the chains of associations that link the input spaces are compressed to create a tighter integration of conceptual content. So, when dinosaur skeletons are displayed in natural history museums, they are typically displayed as full-fledged dinosaurs, not as the mere parts of dinosaurs. If such displays are expertly framed so as to compress the holonymic relationship between a dinosaur and its bones into an identity relationship, blends such as “dinosaur hunter” do as much with language to achieve the same effect.
Fauconnier and Turner’s [2002] blending theory (or the theory of conceptual integration networks to give it its formal title) sets out to explain—via a general architecture of constraints and optimality principles—how blended spaces are constructed via the selective projection of elements from multiple input spaces. But, how are those input spaces constructed in the first place? In the case of blends such as “dinosaur hunter,” it is not unreasonable to assume that the mental spaces for dinosaur and hunter are derived, in part at least, from the corresponding entries in our mental lexicons. In other cases, these inputs may be the products of lower-level processes, such as the processes of conflation and differentiation that lead to the development of primary metaphors [Grady, 2005]. Lakoff and Johnson [1999] argue, for instance, that the neurally grounded processes that give rise to primary metaphors are complemented by conceptual processes that blend these primary inputs into more complex metaphors. For example, the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A (PURPOSEFUL) JOURNEY can be considered a blend of the primary metaphors PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS (which we saw earlier in Wernher von Braun’s metaphor of “aiming for the stars”) and ACTIONS ARE MOTIONS (as when, e.g., a plan becomes reality when it is “put in motion”). In yet other cases, the inputs to a blend may themselves be the products of conceptual blending, which is to say, the blend space of one conceptual integration network may serve as an input space to another. Blends are conceptual products, after all, and successful blends may gain currency in a culture, so that they are given an evocative name or paired with a linguistic form to yield a reusable construction that achieves the status of a cultural trope.
Consider the following description of the film director Sam Mendes from a British newspaper in 2010: “appearance: like the painting in George Clooney’s attic.” The newspaper was moved to sarcastic commentary after Mendes had been announced as the director of the next movie in the James Bond franchise, named Skyfall, and this sarcasm extended to its wry perspective on Clooney’s carefully-constructed media image. The use of the definite article “the” before “painting” would suggest that this is a picture previously known to us, but, lacking any knowledge of Clooney’s attic or of his taste in art, we must fall back on more general, cultural knowledge instead. Fortunately, the linguistic construction “painting in [the] attic” is strongly evocative of Oscar Wilde’s morality tale The Picture of Dorian Gray, not because we remember the actual text of the story but because we are familiar with the phrase’s repeated use in popular cultural as a shorthand for hidden excess and unnatural youthfulness. Recall that Wilde’s novel centers around the gilded youth of the title and his bargain with fate: as Dorian remains forever young and beautiful on the outside, the ravages that time, sin, and excess should have wrought on his appearance are instead reflected in his portrait, which Gray wisely conceals in his attic. The story is so entrenched in the popular imagination that it takes just the merest mention of “the” painting in the attic to bring this particular picture to mind. Like the Da…Dum…Da..Dum..DaDumDaDum theme from the movie Jaws, or Monty Norman’s signature theme from the James Bond movies, this simple construction evokes a wealth of unspoken narrative expectations. Of course, the fictitious painting lurking in Clooney’s attic is not literally a painting of Dorian Gray; rather, it is a painting of Clooney as Gray, which is to say, the painting of a counterfactual Clooney who has committed to the same body-for-soul deal with fate as Wilde’s anti-hero. In other words, “the painting in George Clooney’s attic” is a cue to create a conceptual blend from the input spaces George Clooney and Dorian Gray. A visual representation of the resulting integration network is presented in Figure 2.1.
The blend space of this integration network now becomes available as input to the higherlevel blend, where it is integrated with the target of the original simile, Sam Mendes. Because blends allow partial and highly selective projection of elements from their inputs onto their resulting blend spaces, what gets projected from this newly minted input space is the notion of a picture of George Clooney that differs significantly from the public perception of the actor. In the blend space of this new integration network, Mendes is identified with the figure in the painting—which, following the logic of Wilde’s novel, we imagine as portraying Clooney as an older, wrinklier, flabbier, and generally more dissolute version of himself. So, in this blend space, Mendes is not identified with Clooney as we see him in the media and on the silver screen, but with this far less attractive counterfactual version of Clooney. Figure 2.2 shows the combination of both integration networks that a reader must construct to obtain the meaning of the original simile (which, at its most reductive, asserts that Mendes resembles an older, wrinklier, flabbier, and generally more dissolute version of Clooney). Note that we have elided from our analysis here the metonymy that is necessary to understand a comparison between a person and a painting: Mendes does not look like the painting itself (a flat painted surface in a decorative frame) but like the person that we imagine to be depicted in the painting. So, lurking beneath this simple-seeming simile is a blend within a blend, which in turn hinges on a metaphor (identifying Clooney and his imagined lifestyle choices with Gray and his soul-consuming narcissism), another simile (between Mendes and a less attractive version of Clooney), and a metonymy (allowing portraits to stand for their subjects).
Figure 2.1: A conceptual integration of two mental spaces, one containing George Clooney and one containing Dorian Gray (reproduced from Veale [2012a]).
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