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Makale Özeti:
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Fauconnier and Turner (2002, pp. 389-396) provide
an overview of how blending affects the course of a human
life, and more specifically, how young children are engaged in
building complex blends in very early stages of their lives.
Their detailed analysis shows that only after the young child is
able to master culturally recognized blends will s/he be
effectively ‘living in the blend’ and prove capable of further
achieving other blends with more flexibility.
During early childhood, it appears that learning and mental
development are intrinsically linked to our human ability to
blend and deblend. Besides engaging in direct cultural blends,
the young child can operate on conceptual blends that are not
physically (biologically) given. For instance, this may happen
when their imaginative processes are at work in a wide
variety of games or fun activities, starting with Lego
construction sets to fictive interactions with imaginary
companions. In such games and activities, children manifest
an extraordinary capacity for double-scope blending.
Therefore, by playing games or getting involved in free
activities, young children will bring to mastery mental
integrations that are essential for their lives as adults.
In this light, the paper examines a set of children-designed
games and activities that can all account for cases of fictive or
potential reality. That is, the mental spaces created do not
refer directly to entities in the outside world. I argue that an
analysis of such fantasy mental spaces (with the tools of the
mental space theory) can shed new light on learning and
human creativity. While playing and blending mental spaces
with their counterfactual counterparts, the young subject has
to manipulate his/her ‘split self’ (Lakoff & Johnson 1999) or
counterfactual self. With the knowledge of early evolution of
conceptual blending in children’s games, I propose that
educators may apply the results in diverse areas of instruction
and learning in order to better deal with the cognitive side of
learning, and eventually come to terms with human creativity.
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