Wednesday 14 August 2019

John Bateman On Blends

for many, the appeal to 'chaos theory' simply gives some kind of (misplaced) scientific respectability to vagueness. The idea that it is by no means simple to achieve operationalisable specifications of theoretical terms is absolutely central in almost all scientific work, linguistics too, and does not depend on an appeal to chaos theory. It is difficult to recognise theoretical categories in practice, but making the attempt teaches us more both about the phenomena and the theoretical categories. Even for very conservative non-chaos based systems. 
blends are used with pretty much the same kind of rhetorical force as chaos theory, and to similarly dubious ends often. Being precise about what blends are helps here too (cf. Goguen).


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It also helps to know how blends are understood in the theory under discussion. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 522):
In its ideational metafunction, language construes the human experience — the human capacity for experiencing — into a massive powerhouse of meaning. It does so by creating a multidimensional semantic space, highly elastic, in which each vector forms a line of tension (the vectors are what are represented in our system networks as "systems"). Movement within this space sets up complementarities of various kinds: alternative, sometimes contradictory, constructions of experience, indeterminacies, ambiguities and blends, so that a grammar, as a general theory of experience, is a bundle of uneasy compromises. No one dimension of experience is represented in an ideal form, because this would conflict destructively with all the others; instead, each dimension is fudged so that it can coexist with those that intersect with it.

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 549-50) distinguish blends as one type of indeterminacy, and provide an illustrative interpersonal example:
There are perhaps five basic types of indeterminacy in the ideation base: ambiguities, blends, overlaps, neutralisations, and complementarities — although it should be recognised from the start that these categories are also somewhat indeterminate in themselves. …
(1) ambiguities ('either a or x'): one form of wording construes two distinct meanings, each of which is exclusive of the other.
(2) blends ('both b and y'): one form of wording construes two different meanings, both of which are blended into a single whole.
(3) overlaps ('partly c, partly z'): two categories overlap so that certain members display some features of each.
(4) neutralisations: in certain contexts the difference between two categories disappears.
(5) complementarities: certain semantic features or domains are construed in two contradictory ways. …

(2) Blend
they might win tomorrow
— ability 'they may be able to'
— probability 'it is possible they will'
Here, on the other hand, the meaning of the oblique modal might combines the two senses of 'able' and 'possible', rather than requiring the listener to choose between them. If the verbal group is 'past', however, this again becomes an ambiguity:
they might have won
— ability 'they were capable of winning (but they didn't)'
— probability 'it is possible that they won (we don't know)'