Mental Spaces Theory and Multilayered Meaning Construction

Conceptualization underlying language use is an unconscious and automatic process that interacts with the general human cognitive faculty. The main purpose of Mental Spaces Theory (MST), as one of the major frameworks in Cognitive Linguistics, is to shed light on this process and model it in cognitively motivated ways. This overview pursues two objectives: First, to introduce the basics of the theory, as it was originally proposed by Gilles Fauconnier, and second, to show how MST accounts for networks of mental spaces accommodating semantic contents and how it represents the many roles of cognizers in the construal process. The first part of this overview discusses the background of MST and summarizes its major contributions to the field. The second part follows up on how the theory has been evolving toward investigations of attested linguistic/multimodal data. Illustrating how multiple viewpoints are stacked up in modeling the construal of multimodal artifacts as well as linguistic ones, this overview demonstrates the full interpretive potential of the concept of a "mental space" in the processing of multilayered meaning construction.