The Literary Mind.pdf

CREATIVE BLENDS 69
inference of irony from the discordant image schemas in the King John blend.
But in the sailboat race, the impossibility of the two ships' racing is merely pragmatic—there
is nothing in the structure of the race that is impossible, merely
the extraneous difference in the years during which the two boats existed—and
this merely pragmatic impossibility is irrelevant to the central inferences. Blends
are in general not constructed merely to present some spectacular clash or exotic
impossibility. Suppose someone says, "Four and a half days may seem like an
insurmountable lead, but maybe it isn't: Great America II looks as if she will be
becalmed when she enters the Caribbean, but Northern Light will have a gale
behind her and could pick up enough time to sail right through Great America
II." In this case, the blend incorporates fabulous elements impossible outside the
blend, such as one ship's sailing through another unharmed, but that impossibility
is merely pragmatic and we draw no inferences of irony from that impossibility.
The blended space of the boat race is not constructed exclusively by fusing
counterparts from the input spaces. There are many counterpart connections
between the space of 1853 and 1993: The catamaran and the clipper are counterparts,
as are their courses, their starting points, and their destinations. Many
of these counterparts are fused in the blend: The two courses are fused into one
course, for example, the way the messenger in King John is fused with nature.
But the catamaran and the clipper are not fused into each other in the blend.
The catamaran and the clipper are distinct in the blend.
The passage in Latitude 38 sets up an independent conceptual domain—of
ghost ships and imaginary races. It is specific to the blend; it does not belong to
either input space. This extra and fantastic conceptual domain helps us to notice
the existence of the blend. But blended spaces do not have to set up their own
independent conceptual domains and do not have to make us realize consciously
that we are doing any blending. For example, the passage in Latitude 38 could
easily have read, "At last report, Great America II was 4.5 days ahead of Northern
Light." Here, with the same blend but without the mention of phantom ships,
we might not realize consciously that we have constructed the blend. Another
way to set up the "impossible" blended space so as to provide the right inferences
would be to exploit the standard counterfactual construction: "If the two
ships were racing, Great America II would be 4.5 days ahead of Northern Light at
this point."
Projecting inferences from the blend to an input space is not a simple matter
of copying all of the inferences in the blend to the input space. We know
how the blend connects to its input spaces, and we know how inferences in the
blend correspond to inferences possible in the input spaces. Projecting inferences
from the blend to an input space often involves selecting or translating them to
fit the input space. For example, the inference in the blend that Great America II