Preface

In *Cognitive and Intermedial Semiotics*, we offer a window into applied cognitive semiotics with different examples of meaning production studies. Thus, in the following chapters we will find examples of the different approaches, methods, and theories that cognitive semiotics offers as an interdisciplinary field.

Cognitive semiotics is the interdisciplinary study of meaning, and it combines concepts and methods from developmental, evolutionary, and cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, semiotics, narratology, and neuroscience with the idea that cognition is embodied, dynamic, and distributed. Cognitive semiotics investigates fundamental notions such as metaphors, blends, and narratives, how we communicate through semiotic systems such as language, representations, and gestures, how these have evolved, how they are learned, and how they are shared socially.

To undertake the challenge of understanding the emergence of meaning we have to appeal to a field of diffuse and permeable limits that allows us to consider other discourses such as biosemiotics or the study of signs and meaning in living organisms and systems. Connected with this is the study of gestural languages, artistic and communicative expressions, and also the narrative discourse in which we situate ourselves in our own story in relation to the stories of the world, acknowledging in turn the stories of others and the social narrative in which we all live. Thus, cognitive semiotics underlines the importance of placing meaning-making into the broader context of cognitive, social, and neurobiological processes.

The mind is embodied and situated, and bodies are not only physiological entities but also social and emotional entities. Emotions are a major factor in the interaction between environmental conditions and decision processes. Thus, the field of cognitive semiotics aims not only to understand culture and communication on a large scale but also to study the most elemental processes of the thinking and feeling mind.

The manifestations of meaning should be studied and analyzed as they occur, either experimentally or historically, and not created ad hoc to illustrate theories. Our book tries to present extensively this goal. Several semiotic multimodal aspects are discussed in the different chapters, where we will find studies on: the important interactions between cognitive neuroscience of language and brain and semiotic principles; digital technology and free will; the use of narrative analysis and biosemiotic techniques in decoding animal behavior; the cognitive maps students create when interacting in their university campuses; digital communication and its effect on politics; fairy tales, science fiction books, and fantasy films as new sources of computer metaphors used to design visualization systems based on virtual reality; the comparison of iconicity and phonesthemes in English and Berber; a computational model to create cognitive maps; and a case study on a cognitive blend within a literary text.

**II**

**Chapter 9 139**

Computational Model for the Construction of Cognitive Maps

*by Larisa Yu. Ismailova, Sergey V. Kosikov and Viacheslav E. Wolfengagen*

This book has been possible thanks to the outstanding contributions of Dr. Orkun Alptekin, Dr. Edna Andrews, Prof. Vladimir Averbukh, Dr. Noury Bakrim, Dr. Gabriel Francescoli, Dr. Ted Gemberling, Dr. Larisa Ismailova, and Dr. Berna Valle.

> **Dr. Marta Silvera-Roig and Dr. Asunción López-Varela Azcárate** Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Madrid, Spain

> > **1**

**Chapter 1**

**Abstract**

Pynchon

**blending theory**

and even politics [9].

*Marta Silvera-Roig*

Cognitive Semiotics and

from *The Crying of Lot 49*

(or mental space sequence of the story) of the mentioned blend.

Conceptual Blend: A Case Study

Cognitive semiotics has been defined by the linguist Jordan Zlatev as "the need to unify or at least to 'defragment' our world-views, the need to come to terms with increasingly higher levels of dynamism and complexity". If we consider, as it is clear from the second cognitive revolution, when embodiment claimed its leading role, that meaning emerges from the constant interaction of body-brain-environment, we need to redefine the field that asks "what is meaning and how does it emerge." New theories about metaphors as neural nodes and image schemas would shed light over the emergence of meaning in human communication, and, to do so, the study of conceptual blends as essential cognitive tools and as an integrative theory should be put in the center of the debate. In words of Brandt and Brandt, "blends occur as signs and are therefore a natural subject of cognitive semiotics". Here, we will represent the emergence of meaning in a blend from the highly dynamic and complex narrative *The Crying of Lot 49* by Pynchon and propose a conceptual story

**Keywords:** cognitive semiotics, conceptual metaphor, conceptual blend, biopoetics,

One of the most influential treatises of cognitive linguistics, and thus cognitive semiotics, is *Metaphors We Live By* by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, where the foundations of the conceptual metaphor theory are laid ([1], pp. 18–19). Lakoff, along with other linguists [2–5], extracts evidence of everyday conventional linguistic expressions to argue the existence of metaphorical relationships or mapping between conceptual domains (or idealized cognitive models) in the human mind. One of the objectives of this theory is to point out the metaphorical mappings between domains and how these guide human thinking and behavior, as it is reflected in its application in literature [5], philosophy [6, 7], mathematics [8],

According to this theory, in a conceptual metaphor, we understand a domain in terms of another: CONCEPTUAL DOMAIN (A) IS CONCEPTUAL DOMAIN (B). These two domains receive the name of source domain and target domain. Examples of source domains are travel, war, food, or plants, and examples of target

**1. Existing models: conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual** 
