Article published In: Bringing Figurative Language into Real L2 Classrooms: The challenges of empirical testing
Edited by Ana M. Piquer-Píriz and Reyes Llopis-García
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 22:2] 2024
► pp. 541–563
Regular article
A mental spaces analysis of religious identity discourse
Published online: 11 July 2023
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00159.mue
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00159.mue
Abstract
Religious identity is often viewed as a relatively stable construct, reflecting an individual’s personal worldview. However, individuals living within modern multi-cultural societies often must engage in extensive reflection to orient themselves to faith traditions in ways that are coherent and personally relevant. Although some work has examined the connection between narratives of religious experience, identity and cognition (cf. Richardson, P. (2012). A closer walk: A study of the interaction between metaphors related to movement and proximity and presuppositions about the reality of belief in Christian and Muslim testimonials. Metaphor and the Social World, 2(2), 233–261. ; Richardson, P., & Nagashima, M. (2018). Perceptions of danger and co-occurring metaphors in Buddhist dhamma talks and Christian sermons. In Cognitive Linguistic Studies (Vol. 5, Issue 1, pp. 133–154). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ; Richardson, P., & Mueller, C. M. (2019). Moving yet being still: Exploring source domain reversal and force in explanations of enlightenment. Language and Cognition, 11(2), 310–339. ), the relationship between thinking and speaking about this identity is still a developing area of enquiry, with important consequences for how religious faith and practice are understood. This article presents a detailed analysis of an interview with a UK-based Jewish woman based on the mental spaces (Fauconnier, G. (1994). Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ) and conceptual blending (Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. NY: Basic Books.) frameworks. The analysis shows how mental spaces and the relationship between elements within those spaces emerge over the course of a discourse event so as to constitute a personal account of religious identity. The concluding section furthermore discusses how within- and across-space contrast links are utilized, along with general processes of compression and decompression, to develop a blend that dynamically expresses the interviewee’s religious identity as an integrated and coherent position lying between competing attractor states.
Keywords: mental spaces, blending, cognition, religion, identity, discourse analysis
Article outline
- 1.Introduction and background
- 2.Method
- 3.Analysis
- 4.Discussion and conclusion
References
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