FRAGL 45: Verflechtung mentaler Räume durch Deixis
Carmen Siegmund
Abstract
As a fundamental premise within the research field of Cognitive Linguistics, meaning is assumed to be constructed online in interaction. This meaning making process is further considered to rely on largely unconscious cognitive processes (backstage cognition). Such an underlying process is de-scribed by Gilles Fauconnier: According to his mental space theory, interactants built up so-called mental spaces which are understood to be mental representations of the discursive scene, and which constantly evolve as discourse unfolds. These mental images of space and time are not only always interconnected, but sometimes also cognitively co-present and intertwined.
This paper aims to analyse the role of deictics (verbal alongside with gestural) in such intertwining processes. Four interactional sequences are analysed, taken from a video recording of a triadic inter-action in which the interactants jointly plan a scavenger hunt. It is shown that in some cases, the deictics’ reference in the analysed data is strikingly hard to determine as deictics are used to refer to different entities in several intertwined mental spaces. Most notably, it is argued that some multi-referential deictics (can) function as space builders that evoke mental space complexes by intertwin-ing several mental spaces in a process which is similar to what Fauconnier and Mark Turner describe as blending. The root of this entanglement process lies in the deictics’ multireferentiality.
Keywords:
mentale Räume; Blending Theory; multimodale Deixis; Multireferenzialität; triadische Interaktion