University OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY. Another consequence of this primacy of general cognitive abilities is the essential role of imagination

... Another consequence of this primacy of general cognitive abilities is the essential role of imagination. For many people, the word imagination is related to subjectivism, idealism, and relativism. Since the Enlightenment, imagination has been despised in many theories of language, because it is regarded as a non-rational, unruly, and idiosyncratic play of ideas, and therefore, unsuitable for scientific research. In Cognitive Linguistics, imagination is considered a basic human cognitive ability, central to human meaning and rationality. As Johnson (1987: 172) explains, the way we reason and what we can experience as meaningful are both based on structures of imagination that make our experience what it is. We make sense of our less directly apprehensible experiences on the basis of more directly apprehensible experiences. For instance, Ibarretxe-Antuftano (1999 a,b) has shown how we project part of our bodily experience with the senses onto our experience of having a suspicion in the case of smell, when we say Sailbtiruaren kontuak zuzenak ez zirela erraz usan zit^keen 'It was easy to suspect that the minister's accounts were not clear' (1999b: 32), or onto our experience of being emotionally affected in the case of touch, as in Edertasunak ukitu dv azkenean Wakiren bihotz gogorra 'In the end, beauty change Inaki's hard feelings' (1999a: 74).

Metaphor and metonymy are two basic imaginative cognitive mechanisms. They are not figures of speech, as they are considered by many traditional objectivist approaches (see, for example, Halliday 1985: 319-20); not even the result of a wide array of contextual implications, as proposed by Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 231-37; Papafragou 1996; Goatly 1997). They are the means by which it is possible "to ground our conceptual systems exponentially and to reason in a constrained but creative fashion" (Johnson 1992: 351). As Barcelona (1997: 12) puts it both mechanisms are "complex mental mappings of our knowledge of one domain of experience [the source domain] to structure our knowledge of a different domain of experience [the target domain]". But, whereas in metaphor, we project part of one conceptual domain onto another separate domain, in metonymy, the projection takes place within the same domain.

For instance, in the sentence Orduan ez nven ikusi zer esan nahi wen 'I didn't see at the time what he wanted to say' (elh), we have two different experiential domains: the source domain of the bodily act of visual perception and the target domain of intellection. The mapping between these two different conceptual domains is carried out by means of metaphor. However, in Mirenek Idiazabala jan zuen 'Mary ate the Idiazabal', the mapping does not take place between different conceptual domains, but within the same domain through metonymy; instead of the word gazta 'cheese', we have the name of the place where it is produced.

In many cases, some experiences are more directly mapped and understood metaphorically or metonymically on me basis of' image schemas'. These are abstract and pre-conceptual gestalt structures based on our perceptual interaction, bodily experience and motor programmers, which organise our experience and comprehension. Sentences such as Prezioek gora egin dute are based on the metaphor more is UP / less is down. This metaphorical projection from more to up is in turn based on our understanding of quantity in terms of the verticality schema. This schema is based on our everyday bodily experience: whenever we put more liquid in a container, the level goes up. Other basic conceptual schemas are: me 'container schema', the 'source-path-goal schema', the 'figure/ground schema', the 'balance schema' and so on (see Johnson 1987).

Most of these image schemas, metaphors and metonymies operate on the basis of a conventional 'frame' or ICM. For instance, the metonymic mapping between the food eaten and the customer in Lakoff and Johnson's (1980: 35) example The ham sandwich is waiting for his check works against the background of me conventional restaurant frame or ICM.

Research on metaphor occupies a central position in Cognitive Linguistics. One of the major problems that cognitive linguists still face is the question of how to constrain metaphorical mappings. Attempts to constrain the mapping process in metaphorical production and comprehension can be found in Lakoffs (1990, 1993) 'Invariance Principle', i.e. "metaphorical mappings preserve the cognitive topology of the source domain in a way consistent with the inherent structure of the target domain" (Lakoff 1993: 215). The Invariance Principle is useful in order to constrain the nature of those mappings: that is to say, it is not possible to map from the source domain structure mat does not preserve the inherent structure of the target domain. The only problem with this principle is that it does not show exactly what part of the source domain is the one that must be consistent with me structure of the target domain.

Metonymy has received less attention than metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics. Although early studies, such as Lakoff and Johnson (1980: Ch. 8) and Lakoff (1987: Ch. 5-8 and case study 2), have stressed its importance for categorisation, it was not until recently that metonymy came to be at the core of current investigation. Radden and Kovecses (1996) and Kovecses and Radden (1998) propose a working definition for metonymy based on Langacker's (1993) formulation that metonymy is a cognitive process through which we acquire access to a mental activity via another mental activity and Lakoffs theory of ICMs. Kovecses and Radden define metonymy as "a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity, me vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity, the target, within me same domain, or ICM" (1998; 39). This view on metonymy involves four questions that need to be addressed in the framework of metonymy: (i) identification of the ontological realms where metonymy can occur, (ii) specification of the types of conceptual relationships between the metonymic elements; (iii) definition of the cognitive and communicative principles that select the most 'natural' vehicle-to-target routes; and (iv) definition of the conditions for the selection of 'non-default routes.

Another important and interesting area of research is the interaction between metaphor and metonymy. Goossens (1990) proposes the term 'metaphtonymy' to cover me possible interrelations between metaphor and metonymy. Among these interrelations, he distinguishes two as the dominant patterns: one where the experiential basis for metaphor is a metonymy ('metaphor from metonymy') and another where a metonymy functioning in the target domain is embedded within a metaphor ('metonymy within metaphor'). Along similar lines, Barcelona (1997, 1998, in press b) proposes the conceptual dependency of metaphor on metonymy.

Another tendency is the theory of 'blending' or 'conceptual integration'. This theory, developed from Fauconnier's early work on 'mental spaces' (1985, 1994) and then by him and Turner (Fauconnier 1997; Fauconnier and Turner 1994, 1996,1998), aims at modelling the dynamic evolution of speakers' on-line representations. As Fauconnier and Turner put it "conceptual integration is concerned with on-line dynamical cognitive work people do to construct meaning for local purposes of thought and action. It builds up networks of connected spaces-inputs, generic spaces, and blended spaces" (1998). Generic spaces contain what the inputs have in common. Blended spaces contain structure from the generic space and structure that is impossible for the inputs, they are created via processes of composition, completion, and elaboration, m this theory, metaphorical and non-metaphorical conceptualisations are treated as formally identical at a certain level; as a consequence the transfer of structure in metaphor is similar to the transfer of structure in non-metaphorical cases.

CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, I have briefly summarised the main theoretical and methodological tenets in the framework of Cognitive Linguistics and illustrated them with examples taken from Basque. It has been shown how this model takes human experience as the motivation for what is meaningful in the human mind; thought is not a manipulation of symbols but the application of cognitive processes to conceptual structures. Meaning structures come not only from the direct relationship with the external world but also from the nature of bodily and social experience (how humans experience with the world) and from human capacity to project from some aspects based on this experience to some abstract conceptual structures. This is perhaps one of the achievements of this approach: the fact that imaginative aspects of reason, such as metaphor, metonymy and mental imagery are seen as central to reason, not as extra-linguistic aspects. This allows for the existence of those meanings that do not have real-world reference.