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This chapter focuses on the engine of human imagination —the conceptual integration in which conceptual arrays are blended to form compressed, memorable conceptual packets, agreeable to human thought. The highest form of conceptual integration is the ‘double-scope’ integration. Double scope integration is the hallmark that distinguishes modern human imagination from its ancestors. The double-scope integration network consists of input conceptual arrays with different organizing frames and creates a blend with organizing frame that receives projections from each of those organizing frames. In this network, the organizing frames give contributions to the blend, and their sharp divergences offer the possibility for rich clashes. These clashes offer conceptual challenges and the resulting blends can turn out to be imaginative.

Because it unfolds through time, conceptualization (and hence linguistic meaning) is inherently dynamic. There are numerous natural paths that it tends to follow, and which tend to coalign in linguistic structure. In one kind of path, a salient reference point provides mental access to a target. Certain basic grammatical phenomena are analyzed in terms of reference point relationships, including possessives, pronominal anaphora, topic constructions, and trajector/ landmark organization (subject and object). A subject differs from a discourse topic by being structurally internal to a clause and conceptually intrinsic to the clausal process. Trajector and landmark are characterized dynamically as the first and second reference points evoked in building up to the full conception of a profiled relationship. This explains their general grammatical accessibility as well as their role in certain specific constructions. The mental world we construct is grounded in our experience as creatures with bodies who engage in motor and sensory interactions (embodiment). In constructing it, we transcend direct experience through abstraction, conceptual integration, and subjectification: the application of mental operations immanent in certain conceptions to situations for which their occurrence is extrinsic. Examples include fictive motion, fictive change, and the covert invocation of imagined scenarios. Mental simulation is a fundamental aspect of conception and linguistic meaning. Subjectification is an important factor in grammaticization (the evolution of grammatical elements from lexical sources). Many grammatical notions are subjective counterparts of basic aspects of everyday experience. Grammar reflects the means of disengagement through which we transcend immediate experience and construct our mental world. It is thus a key to conceptual analysis.

This chapter offers evidence consistent with the proposal that sign languages preceded spoken languages in the evolution of language. Using conceptual integration theory, the authors argue that what may be considered “just a funny story in British Sign Language” contains the human singularities needed to create novel mappings and compressions between pre-existing conventional cognitive parts and conventionally structured cognitive parts that make up human language. While it is arguable that spoken language could do without analogy, framing, and the like (though it would be vastly impoverished), it is entirely impossible for sign language to do so. Thus the fact that these human singularities emerged at roughly the same time as language makes sense if the first human language was signed.

Grammar consists in patterns for assembling symbolically complex expressions. Such expressions are characterized as assemblies of symbolic structures, also called constructions. In large measure, symbolic assemblies are hierarchically arranged: at a given level of organization, component symbolic structures are integrated to form a composite symbolic structure, which can in turn function as component structure at a higher level, and so on. Component structures are integrated both semantically and phonologically, the phonological integration serving to symbolize the semantic integration. Although linguistic meanings are only partially compositional, compositional patterns are essential to the formation and understanding of novel expressions. These patterns are themselves symbolic assemblies, differing from expressions just by virtue of being schematic rather than specific; they are thus referred to as constructional schemas. Abstracted from occurring expressions, these schemas serve as templates for assembling and assessing new ones. A distinction is made between unipolar and bipolar organization, depending on whether the elements involved are delimited solely on semantic or phonological grounds or whether they are delimited by their participation in symbolic relationships. That is, unipolar organization is a matter of phonological or conceptual structure per se, considered independently of symbolic relationships, whereas bipolar organization pertains to the semantic and phonological structures which function in lexicon and grammar. Unipolar and bipolar organization do not have to match at either the semantic or the phonological pole.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which double-scope integration achieves conceptual compression, a hallmark of art. Cognitively modern human beings have art, language, science, religion, refined tool use, advanced music and dance, fashions of dress, and mathematics. Blue jays, border collies, dolphins, and bonobos do not. Only human beings have what we have. This conspicuous Grand Difference constitutes a puzzling discontinuity in the evolution of life. The Way We Think (2002), and earlier publications beginning in 1993, put forward the hypothesis that the Grand Difference arose in the following way. The basic mental operation of conceptual integration, also known as blending, has been present and evolving in various species for a long time, probably since early mammals, and there is no reason to doubt that many mammalian species aside from human beings have the ability to execute rudimentary forms of conceptual integration. Human beings evolved not an entirely different kind of mind, but instead the capacity for the strongest form of conceptual integration, known as double-scope blending.

This chapter offers a balanced, symmetrical account of the sciences and humanities as complementary disciplinary clusters representing different but equally valuable sets of epistemic stances and intellectual practices. It goes on to explain how, under pressure from changing intellectual and institutional conditions and culturally pervasive loaded dualisms (e.g., real work and mere play, real things and mere words), the symmetry breaks down and becomes invidious comparison, mutual misunderstanding and mutual antagonism. Noting that the asymmetrical Two-Culture ideology reflected in the recent “science wars” continues to dominate public views of the academy, the chapter concludes by urging mutually respectful interdisciplinary interaction but arguing against either the possibility or the desirability of a unification of all knowledge or, as currently proposed, a “conceptual integration” of all disciplines.

The most salient idea that distinguishes cognitive linguistics from other kinds of linguistics is the attempt to describe and explain language use with reference to a number of cognitive operations—commonly called “construal operations” in cognitive linguistics, including metaphor. It is suggested that cognitive, or construal, operations play an essentially dual role in our mental life. On the one hand, it is through such operations that we build or acquire a conventional conceptual system through which we conceptualize experience. The second role of construal operations is that, given that conceptual system, the operations help us further interpret or conceptualize (new) experience, an ever-changing world, as a result of which the conceptual system also changes. The chapter provides a brief description of those construal operations, in addition to metaphor, that are most directly involved in the creation and use of abstract concepts.