The Literary Mind.pdf

104 THE LITERARY MIND
as in "He hit the ball into the bleachers" or "They shoved the poor guy out of the
room." The grammatical construction represents a basic abstract spatial action-story
in which an agent performs a physical action that causes a physical object to move
in a spatial direction. Fauconnier and I have analyzed the way in which this grammatical
construction serves as a prompt to blend two things: the events referred to
by the vocabulary filling the construction and the caused-motion story represented
by the construction itself. In the resulting blend, the unintegrated events to which
the vocabulary refers acquire the integrated event structure of the caused-motion
story. For example, if we say, "He floated the toy boat across the pond," then even
though floaf encodes only the manner of the boat's motion, and not the causal action
or the causality between that action and the motion of the boat, we still know that
we are being asked to conceive of a scene in which the floating of the boat is a story
of caused motion. As Goldberg observes, "He sneezed the napkin off the table" has
a verb that is a "parade example" of intransitivity, but its use in this construction
prompts us to think of a scene in which sneezing physically causes the motion of an
object in a direction. It does not mean, for example, that he sneezed and someone
picked a napkin up off the table to hand him, because that is not a caused-motion
story. We blend the physical caused-motion story with the story of sneezing.
We project from the basic abstract action story of caused physical motion
an even more abstract generic story of causation that is not necessarily physical
and that can be projected to target stories that may not be physical. For example,
we can say, "They laughed the poor guy out of the room," even though laughing
is not a physical force. We can say, "She drove him out of his mind" even if she
exerted no physical force on him and even though the result is not physical motion
in a spatial direction. The basic abstract story of physical caused motion involves
physical spatiality; the generic story of caused motion does not, and can apply to
targets that are not physical or spatial.
Grammar contains many devices for indicating what mental spaces are to
be built and how they are to be connected. These devices include tenses, moods,
some verbs, and conjunctions. Grammar is a set of instruments used to guide
the building and blending of spaces and the projecting of generic spaces. In other
words, grammar is the servant of parable. In the final chapter of this book, we
will consider why it is such an apt servant.
As an example of how grammar gives us guidance in space building, space
blending, and projection of generic spaces, consider the xyz construction, whose
syntax is deceptively simple:
NounPhrase(x) be NounPhrase(y) of NounPhrase(z)
as in Vanity is the quicksand of reason. This simple syntax has a complex semantic
and pragmatic interpretation: Construct a set of spaces and projections with the