The Literary Mind.pdf

108 THE LITERARY MIND
Now let us consider the source input space. Suppose we are discussing the
relative aesthetic qualities of Italian and Latin, and we comment upon the precision
of Latin in Vergil, Propertius, or Horace as compared to the florid and
ostentatious qualities of Italian in Bocaccio or Tasso. We say, "Well, Italian is
the daughter of Latin, and her ostentatious beauty is really a rebellion against
her mother's austerity." Here, we recruit to the source input space of mother and
daughter not just progeneration but also social relations between mothers and
daughters, and in particular adolescent rebellion over appearance and behavior.
Under this recruitment of structure to the source input space, Italian is still the
daughter of Latin, but in an entirely different additional sense.
In all these examples, the underlying conceptual domains—kinship and languages—are
the same, but the spaces selected for recruiting additional structure
to the source input space differ example to example, and the spaces selected for
recruiting additional structure to the target input space differ example to example.
The resulting configurations—source input space, generic space, target input
space, and blended space—are different in each case.
Some recruitments to source and to target will be more common than others
and thus may come to mind more quickly and give rise to highly salient default
interpretations. In isolation, "Italian is the mother of Latin" will raise eyebrows.
Common or default recruitments are a phenomenon of thought in general: we
are always ready to use default conceptual connections as we think. It is important
to recognize, however, that common, default recruitments do not give us fixed
basic concepts: we can always unplug the default connections; they are, in technical
jargon, "defeasible." They look stable and fixed sometimes, but only because
they are entrenched. Our most entrenched concepts and connections are formed
by the same mechanisms of parable we have seen in the exotic and unusual cases.
INVARIANCE REVISITED
By now, we have detected many features of parable: input spaces (which sometimes
are related as source and target); abstract structure that is shared by inputs;
generic spaces that contain that shared structure; counterpart connections that
exist between inputs because of their shared structure; projection from inputs to
a blend; development of emergent structure in the blend; projection of structure,
inferences, and affect back from the blend to inputs; and variable recruitment
of structure from other spaces to the inputs themselves.
This many-space model of parable makes it possible to give a concise statement
of the invariance principle: Conceptual projection, which has as one of its
fundamental activities the projection of image-schematic structure from a source
input to a target input, shall not result in an image-schematic clash in the target.