Abstract

The chapter discusses meaning, which is posited to originate from connections across various mental spaces. It is dynamic and involves complex operations such as projection, integration, linking, and blending. Blending is a general and central parabolic activity of the everyday mind which generates blended spaces from which central inferences are constructed. The blended space consists of input spaces which provide projections to the blend and also receives projections back from the projected blend. Thus a model of projection arises that is dynamic, as opposed to the direct, one-way, and positive model presented in the previous chapters. In parabolic blending, input spaces to the blend do not have to be related as source and target and are often rhetorically unequal. Projecting influences from the blend to an input space also involves selection and translation in order to fit the latter. The remaining section summarizes the principles of parabolic blending and discusses the concepts of completion, composition, and elaboration.