FRAGL 44: Mentale Räume und Blendingprozesse
Frederike Schoder
Abstract
Abstract:
This paper deals with the role that mental spaces and blending processes partake in understanding fictional narratives as instantiated in the video clip "#besonderehelden. Zusammen gegen Corona", which was issued by the German government to enlist support for the measures taken to contain Covid 19. The first part of the paper provides an overview of the theory of mental spaces and the blending theory (Fauconnier 1994, Fauconnier & Turner 2002), which belong to the research field of cognitive linguistics. In the second, analytical part of the paper, the theoretical considerations are transferred to the aforementioned video clip. It is demonstrated how mental spaces are constructed and connected with each other to construe the fictionalized discourse situation that is displayed in the video. The approach of blending theory is further used to explain how emergent, creative meaning is generated in the video clip. For that purpose, three examples of blending processes in the video clip are examined. It is first shown that the fictionalization of the narrative hinges on the resolution of incongruences between the spectator’s Reality Space and a fictional future space through a cognitive blending process. I further discuss two examples of multimodal blending processes in which incoherent visual and linguistic input of the video is restructured and given a new meaning in the blend. The analysis reveals that blending processes are indeed fundamental to unlocking the message of the video clip.
Keywords: Kognitive Linguistik, mentale Räume, Blending Theory, Bedeutungskonstitution, Werbung, Fiktionalisierung