Mental Spaces, Language Modalities, and Conceptual Integration

Abstract

In working on matters related to language over the years, my greatest surprise has been to find out how little of the rich meanings we construct is explicitly contained in the forms of language itself. I had taken it for granted, at first, that languages were essentially coding systems for semantic relations, and that sentences, when appropriately associated with “natural” pragmatic specifications, would yield full meanings. Quite interestingly, this is not the way language works, nor is it the way that meaning is constructed. Rather, language, along with other aspects of expres-sion and contextual framing, serves as a powerful means of prompting dynamic on-line construc-tions of meaning that go far beyond anything explicitly provided by the lexical and grammatical forms.