Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research

University of Diyala
College Of Education For Humanities
Department of English

Conceptual integration in selected English poetic text

Conceptual integration in Sylvia Plath’s

’The Applicant ‘

By
Maryam k. Ali

Under supervision

of Prof.Dr. Ayad Hameed Mahamood

general linguistics
2021 A.D 1433 H.
 LIST OF CONTENTS

CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION IN
PAGE SELECTED ENGLISH POETIC TEXT

I
ABSTRACT

II
INTRODUCTION

III
LIST OF CONTENTS

ONE DEFINING
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
TYPICAL STRUCTURE OF INTEGRATION

TYPES OF INTEGRATION

ANALYZING CONCEPTUAL BLENDING

USDED IN THE ''THE APPLICANT''
Abstract

This research aims to show that Fauconnier and Turner’s conceptual

integration network or ‘blending’ theory can provide an integrated and
coherent account of the cognitive mechanisms by which poetry is
constructed and construed. Taking as its example Sylvia Plath’s poem
‘The Applicant’, a poem already analyzed by Elena Semino from the
perspectives of discourse, possible worlds, and schema theories, this
research shows how Fauconnier and Turner’s optimality constraints
interact to provide a complex blending of conceptual metaphors in the
poem that reveal the poet’s own conflicted attitudes about marriage and
the empty promises of a consumer society just four months before her
suicide. Far from providing a new critical reading of the poem, the
research makes explicit the implicit mappings that readers adopt in
drawing conclusions about the poem that are shared by many literary
critics.
Introduction

The purpose of this research is twofold. The first objective is to describe

the strategies and procedures a reader implicitly adopts to interpret a
poem. I hope to show that the process of ‘mapping’ as developed by
Fauconnier and Turner(2002) in their conceptual integration network
theory, or ‘blending’, as it is commonly known, is not only fundamental
to conceptualizations common to everyday discourse but also basic to the
cognitive processing that takes place in both the construction and
construal of poetry.
My second objective is metatheoretical. I do not wish to argue that the
principles and methodologies outlined in blending are new to the study of
poetry; philosophers and linguists and literary critics, after all, have been
employing them since Aristotle first published the Poetics. Rather, I
should like to suggest that blending theory makes explicit the conceptual
tools we use in creating and interpreting literary texts.
This research , then, explores the ways blending can illuminate the
processing of literary texts by applying the theory to the analysis of one
poem.1 In my discussion of Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Applicant’, reproduced
below, I show how it is possible to avoid a relentless subjectivity of
interpretation. By tracing the labyrinthine connections created by the
association of words and phrases and by mapping the concepts that
emerge from those connections, it is possible, I claim The poem as a
whole creates what I call a ‘complex blend’. A complex blend refers to
the process by which multiple blends create ‘optimality crossovers’ into
each other’s input spaces when ‘running’ the blend. A poem is also a
complex blend in the sense that its possible interpretations are not always
immediately apparent; the reader must actively work to understand the
nature and relations of its cross-space connections.
On defining

Conceptual blending is a set of cognitive operations for combining

(or blending) words, images, and ideas in a network to create meaning.
Conceptual integration, also known as conceptual blending, is a theory of
human cognition that has been developed over the last fifteen years. Its
main proponents and developers have been Gilles Fauconnier, Professor
of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, and
Mark Turner, currently Dean of Arts and Sciences at Case Western
Reserve University in Ohio, although many other scholars have utilized
and further developed this theory in connection with a wide variety of
investigations (Coulson 2001; Coulson and Oakley 2000; Fauconnier and
Turner 2002; Grady 2005b; Hutchins 2005; Sweetser 2000; Turner
2006a). The core notion of conceptual integration theory (sometimes
referred to as “CIT”) is that many types of human thought consist of the
integration or blending of mental spaces, and that the ability to perform
certain types of conceptual blends is what distinguishes humans from
other animals, and modern human cognition from earlier forms of
hominin cognition
Historical background

Over the past seven or eight years, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark
Turner’s “Blending Theory” has attracted considerable attention from
cognitive linguists. In sections of two previous books (Turner, 1996;
Fauconnier, 1997) and in a number of jointly authored articles (e.g.,
Fauconnier & Turner 1998, 2000; of their theory using examples from a
host of disciplines and socio-cultural environments. The International
Cognitive Linguistics Conferences in Stockholm (1999) and Santa
Barbara (2001) featured theme sessions on blending theory, other
scholars started to publish in the field, and Cognitive Linguistics devoted
a special issue to blending (Coulson & Oakley, 2000). Clearly, the
authors deemed the time had come to collect and adapt their material for
a “state-of-the-art” book, and they chose a title raising high expectations

The basics of blending theory are fairly straightforward. The

underlying idea is that representations – language taking pride of place –
reveal that people conceptualise by 2 constantly integrating information
from different domains of knowledge and experience. As such, there is
nothing shockingly new about this, as the authors are the first to admit.
The idea of combining elements of the old to create something novel
inspired the principle of the collage as theorized and practised by André
Breton and the Surrealists, as well as the montage theory of Sergej
Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and other Russian filmmakers of the
1920s. But what is new is that Fauconnier and Turner show that such
collating, montaging, or blending does not reflect activities typically
undertaken by artists and other creative minds, but are the bread and
butter of everyday thinking. Moreover, they have built an attractively
simple model that allows a range of hybrid phenomena in different media
and disciplines to be analysed according to the same “rules.”. While
Fauconnier had developed Mental Spaces Theory in order to account for
a number of traditional problems in meaning construction . Turner
approached meaning construction from the perspective of his studies of
metaphor in literary language. Fauconnier and Turner’s research
programmers converged on a range of linguistic phenomena that
appeared to share striking similarities and that resisted straightforward
explanation by either of the frameworks they had developed.
 Fauconnier and Turner both observed that in many cases meaning
construction appears to derive from structure that is apparently
unavailable in the linguistic or conceptual structure that functions as the
input to the meaning construction process. Blending Theory emerged
from their attempts to account for this observation.
Microsoft Word - Dissertation _Final Version to Upload_ 080510
Typical structure of integration

To understand this theory, it is helpful first to define some key

terms. The most important definitions for our purposes are the following
(Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 102-03): Mental Spaces: these are small
conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local
understanding and action. They are modified as thought and discourse
unfolds, but can also become entrenched in long term memory. They are
structured by frames and cognitive models. Input Spaces or Inputs:
mental spaces that are used as inputs to a conceptual blend. Generic
Space: this space contains what the input spaces have in common.
Elements in the generic space map on to their counterparts in the input
spaces. Frames: long term schematic structure – things we “already know
about” – to which mental spaces are connected and which organize
mental spaces.

The Blend: this is also a mental space, but it is the one created by
projections from the input spaces. Projection from the input spaces is
selective, i.e. not all elements of the input spaces are projected into the
blend, and in fact there are quite strong constraints on projections from
the input spaces into the blend. Emergent Structure: structure that is not
in the input spaces. It is generated through composition (the putting
together of elements that are not in the input spaces), completion (the
bringing of additional structure to the blend, e.g. in completing a pattern),
or elaboration (the “running” of the blend, i.e. treating a blend as a
simulation and running it imaginatively). 26 Vital Relations: conceptual
relations that show up again and again in compression5 under blending.
They are relationships between elements in the input spaces that are
compressed inside the blend. The vital relations commonly seen are:
Change, Identity, Time, Space, Cause-Effect, PartWhole, Representation,
Role, Analogy, Disanalogy, Property, Similarity, Category, Intentionality,
and Uniqueness (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 101).
Types of integration

Fauconnier and Turner have identified a spectrum of types of blends

.

there are a number of different kinds of integration network.

Although Fauconnier and Turner propose a continuum that relates
integration networks of various kinds, there are four points along the
continuum that stand out. We briefly survey these four distinct types of
integration network below.

Simplex networks
The simplest kind of integration network involves two inputs, one that
contains a frame with roles and another that contains values. This is a
simplex network. What makes this an integration network is that it gives
rise to a blend containing structure that is in neither of the inputs.
Consider example .

John is the son of Mary.

This utterance prompts for an integration network in which there is one

input containing a FAMILY frame with roles for MOTHER and SON.
The second input contains the values JOHN and MARY. The integration
network compresses the ROLE-VALUE outer-space relations into
UNIQUENESS in the blend, so that JOHN is the SON and MARY the
MOTHER, and so that JOHN IS MARY’S SON. The motivation
for the cross-space connections is the generic space which contains the
elements FEMALE and MALE. These elements identify potential
counterparts in the inputs.
To reiterate, only one of the inputs (input 1) contains a frame. The
simplex network therefore represents an instance of basic framing

Mirror networks
According to Fauconnier and Turner, the defining feature of a mirror
network is that all the spaces in the network share a common frame,
including the blend.

One example of a mirror network that we have already discussed in detail

is the BOAT RACE blend Each of the spaces in this example contain the
frame in which a boat follows a course, including the blend, which has
the additional schema relating to a RACING frame.
Single-scope networks
While in the simplex network only one of the inputs is structured by a
frame, and in the mirror network all the spaces share a common frame, in
the single scope network both inputs contain frames, but each is distinct.
Furthermore, only one of the input frames structures the blend. Consider
example
Microsoft has finally delivered the knock-out punch to its rival Netscape.
This sentence prompts for an integration network in which there are two
inputs. In one input there are two business rivals, MICROSOFT and
NETSCAPE, and Microsoft takes Netscape’s market share. In the other
input there are two BOXERS, and the first boxer knocks out the second.
In the blend,MICROSOFT and NETSCAPE are BOXERS, and
MICROSOFT KNOCKS OUT NETSCAPE.

What distinguishes this type of network is that only one

frame (here, the BOXING frame rather than BUSINESS frame) serves to
organize the blend. In other words, the
roles for BOXERS ,while the focus input provides the relevant elements:
the values MICROSOFT and NETSCAPE.
An important function of single-scope networks is to employ pre-existing
compressions in the framing input to organize diffuse structure from the
focus input The framing input is itself a blend that contains a number of
pre-existing inner-space relations. These include compressions over
TIME, SPACE and IDENTITY (different
individuals perform as boxers, either as a hobby or as a career, and
through shared identity give rise to the role BOXER), among others,
which are then compressed into a BOXING frame. This pre-existing
blend functions as the framing input for the single-scope network a
tightly compressed inner-space relation that includes just two
participants, a single boxing space, a limited period of time (for example,
ten three-minute rounds), and a specific kind of activity. This inner-space
relation, when projected to the blend, provides structure onto which a
range of diffuse activities in the focus input can be projected: the input
relating to BUSINESS RIVALRY between MICROSOFT and
NETSCAPE. The blend compresses the diffuse nature of business rivalry
as a result of the properties of the framing input. This function of single-
scope networks in particular relates directly to one of the main sub goals
of blending compress what is diffuse this sub goal.
Single-scope networks form the prototype for certain types of conceptual
metaphor, such as compound metaphors and metaphors motivated by
percep-tual resemblance. In other words, the source-target mapping in a
metaphor is part of an integration network that results in a blend. From
this perspective ,many conceptual metaphors may be more insightfully
characterised as blends.

However, it does not follow that all metaphors are blends. While
compound metaphors like BUSINESS IS BOXING, or the more general
mapping BUSINESS IS PHYSICAL COMBAT may be blends, it is less
obvious that primary metaphors are blends. We return to this point below.

Double-scope networks
We turn finally to double-scope networks, in which both inputs also
contain distinct frames but the blend is organised by structure taken from
each frame, hence the term ‘double-scope’ as opposed to ‘single-scope’.
One consequence of this is that the blend can sometimes include structure
from inputs that is incompatible and therefore clashes. It is this aspect of
double-scope networks that makes them particularly important, because
integration networks of this kind are highly innovative and can lead to
novel inferences.

Fauconnier and Turner argue that double-scope blends are unique to

our species, and that the ability to perform double-scope blends is critical
to art, religion, science and, more generally, acts of imagination. They
argue that the ability to perform these blends arose approximately 50,000
years ago, at the outset of the Upper Paleolithic, as shown by the so-
called “creative explosion” that they (and others) claim occurred at that
time (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 36, 183; Turner 2006a).
An example of a double-scope blend that we have already
encountered, which does not involve clashes, is the COMPUTER
DESKTOP blend. Fauconnier and Turner (2002) describe this blend in
the following way:
The Computer Desktop interface is a double-scope network. The two
principle inputs have different organizing frames: the frames of office
work with folders, files, trashcans, on the one hand, and the frame of
traditional computer commands, on the other. The frame in the blend
draws from the frame of office work – throwing trash away,
opening files – as well as from the frame of traditional computer
commands–‘find’, ‘replace’, ‘save’, ‘print’. Part of the imaginative
achievement here is finding frames that, however different, can both
contribute to the blended activity in ways that are compatible.
‘Throwing things in the trash’ and ‘printing’ do not clash, although they
do not belong in the same frame. (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 131)
We can compare this example with a double-scope blend in which the
two organising frames do clash.
You’re digging your own grave.
This idiomatic expression relates to a situation in which someone is
doing something foolish that will result in unwitting failure of some kind.
For instance, a businessman, who is considering taking out a loan that
stretches his business excessively, might be warned by his accountant that
the business risks collapse. At this point, the accountant might say:
You’re digging your own financial grave.
This double-scope blend has two inputs: one in which the
BUSINESSMAN takes out a LOAN his company can ill afford and
another relating to GRAVE DIGGING.

In the blend, the loan proves to be excessive and the company fails:
the BUSI NESSMAN and his BUSINESS end up in a FINANCIAL
GRAVE. In this example, the inputs clash in a number of ways. For
example, they clash in terms of causality. While in the BUSINESS input,
the excessive loan is causally related to failure in the GRAVE DIGGING
input, digging a grave does not cause death; typically it is a response to
death. Despite this, in the blend, digging the grave causes DEATH-AS-
BUSINESS FAILURE. This is an imaginative feat that blends inputs
from clashing frames. The reason the blend is successful, despite the
clash, is that it integrates structure in a way that achieves human scale.
Because the accountant’s utterance gives rise to the DEATH-AS-
BUSINESS FAILURE interpretation, the businessman is able to
understand that the loan is excessive and will cause the business to fail.
Hence the causal structure of the blend (the idea that digging the grave
causes the failure) can be projected back to the first input space in order
to modify it. In the BUSINESS input, the businessman can decide
to decline the loan and thus save his business. In this way, the blend
provides global insight, and thereby provides a forum for the construction
and development of scenarios that can be used for reasoning about
aspects of the world.

According to Fauconnier and Turner, this enables us to predict outcomes,

draw inferences and apply these insights back in the input spaces before
the events constructed in the blend come about. For this reason,
Fauconnier and Turner argue that blending, and double-scope blending in
particular, is an indispensable tool for human thought.
Analyzing conceptual blending usded in the '' The Applicant''

''The Applicant''

First, are you our sort of person?

Do you wear

A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,

A brace or a hook,
5 Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then

How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying. Open your hand.
10 Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing

To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
15 It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end

And dissolve of sorrow

We make new stock from the salt.

I notice you are stark naked.
20 How about this suit

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.

Will you marry it?

It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire, and bombs through the roof.
25 Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.
Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
30 Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,

In fifty gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
35 It can talk, talk, talk.

In ‘The Applicant’, marriage is portrayed as a packaged bill of goods for

sale. Both these input spaces, sales and marriage, are themselves the
result of blended spaces, the results of multiple metaphorical mappings.

Reading the poem involves running the blend. One input space provides
the topological frame for the blend, projecting the need, promise, and
guarantee structure of the sales routine. The other provides topological
details which specify the values of roles in the organizing frame,
importing the language of the marriage arrangement into the blend. For
example, the sales question ‘Will you buy it?’ structures the frame for the
blend, while the marriage space provides the topological element ‘marry’.
Each of the poem’s three main scenarios – hand, suit, and doll – creates
its own multiple blended spaces, in which the elements that are imported
from the input spaces are brought together, but still preserve elements
from their own spaces that conflict in the blends.
 Operations which involves
two persons getting things
from each others ,
beautifulness ,innocence

GENERIC SPACE

generic space

Sales,
Marriage, women
doll ,thing , hands

Input 1 using offers ,used by input2

person in order to help or
pleasure him

Blend space
These mappings provide a series of spaces that contribute to the multiple
blends that become the input spaces for the sales and marriage scenarios.
In the interview/benefits space, where the applicant has no need for a
physical false hand, ‘a hook’ (line 4), his hand is construed as an open,
empty container ,and a whole host of metaphorical meanings rush in. To
be ‘empty-handed’ is to
be without something, to have nothing to offer; to ‘open [one’s] hand’ is
to prepare to receive something; to present ‘a hand’ is not only a
synecdoche for a woman but a metonymy for work or help as in the
phrases ‘to lend a hand’, ‘give me a hand’, ‘farm-hand’. In the marriage
space, the hand of the woman that is offered to the man is not only herself
as an object but also her work as provider (‘bring teacups’), reliever/fixer
(‘roll away headaches’), and obedient servant (‘do whatever you tell it’).
 CONCLUSION

In this research, we provided further evidence for the cognitive role

of blended spaces in the operation of metaphor ( for example
between marriage and sales ,woman and hands) . We showed that
formal expression in language is a way of prompting hearers and
readers to assemble and to develop the appropriate conceptual
constructions, including blends. There is no encoding of concepts into
words or decoding of words into concepts. Meaning is not
compositional in the usual sense.

We considered expressions that consist of names of elements from

different input spaces. The named elements allow the retrieval of a
partial mapping and the construction of a blend based on that
mapping. In the majority of cases, the named elements are not
counterparts in the mapping.
Conceptual blending involves cross-space mapping of counterparts
and integration of events. Linguistic forms can also be blended on the
basis of cross-form mappings. However, conceptual blends typically
are not ex- pressed by formal blends, and formal blends do not have
to express conceptual blends

REFERENCES
References
Axelrod, S. G. (1990) Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Baltimore,
MD and London :Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bassnett, S. (1987) Sylvia Plath. Houndmills and London: Macmillan.
Cook, G. (1990) ‘A Theory of Discourse Deviation: The Application of Schema
Theory to theAnalysis of Literary Discourse’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of
Leeds.
Cook, G. (1994) Discourse and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fauconnier, G. (1994) Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. (2002) The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and
the Mind’sHidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Folsom, J. (1991) ‘Death and Rebirth in Sylvia Plath’s “Berck-Plage’’’, Journal of
Modern Literature17: 521–35, available online at URL (accessed on 30 May 1999)
http://stinfwww.informatik.uni- leipzig.de/~beckmann/plath.html

Freeman, M. H. (2002) ‘Cognitive Mapping in Literary Analysis’, Style 36(3): 466–

83.Freeman, M. H. (forthcoming) ‘Is Iconicity Literal? Cognitive Poetics and the
LITERAL Concept in
Poetry’, in S. Coulson and B. Lewandowska (eds) The Literal/Nonliteral Distinction.
Berlin: Peter Lang.
Haiman, J. (ed.) (1985) Iconicity in Syntax: Typological Studies in Language.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
Hughes, T. (ed.) (1981) Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems. New York: Book of the
Month Club.
Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal
About the Mind. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press.
Norton, H. (1996) ‘Sharpening the Axe: The Development of Voice in the Poetry of
Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton’, unpublished PhD thesis, Bowling Green State
University.
Perloff, M. (1990) ‘The Two Ariels; The ReMaking of the Sylvia Plath Canon’, in M.
Reddy, M. (1978) ‘The Conduit Metaphor – A Case of Frame Conflict in our Thought
aboutLanguage’, in A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, pp. 284–324. Cambridge:
CambridgeUniversity Press.
Ross, J. R. (n. d.) ‘The Taoing of Sound’, unpublished ms.
Language and Literature 2005 14(1)

Semino, E. (1997) Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts. London
and New York:Longman.
Sinha, C. (1999) ‘Grounding, Mapping, and Acts of Meaning’, in T. Janssen and G.
Redeker (eds)
Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, Scope and Methodology, pp. 223–55. Berlin: