Conceptual integration (blending) in Seamus Heaney's discourse and poetic work

The relation between Linguistics and Poetics has often been a controversial issue in Poetic Studies. With the advent of Cognitive Linguistics and its open disposition to consider any kind of discourse as interesting enough samples of human thought---and human thought being discovered to be of a figurative nature---doors have been widely opened to poetry. The present PhD thesis explores this relation once again. We study poetic discourse from a cognitive-semantics perspective, recognising the reader as the protagonist of literary activity, and assuming that literature (poetry in particular) can be understood as one of the manifold cases of human expression produced and understood through ordinary thought. In the work we propose Fauconnier and Turner's Blending Theory as the starting and fundamental tool to work with when coming to the poem analysis task from a cognitive perspective. The work offers a systematic methodology (Integrational Method), which has been designed mainly for didactic purposes as a practical tool for both poetry students and scholars. Our choice of Blending Theory (BT) as starting point for poetry analysis is based on the fact that BT is a quite enough open frame for the student to be able to account for manifold discourse aspects such as: (a) the relations between the formal-conceptual elements suggested by a poem, and (b) their integration in a consistent cognitive structure in the reader's mind. We have also incorporated some aspects of many other cognitive linguistic theories that, we expect, will illuminate the poem analysis, such as those on Conceptual Metaphor, Idealised Cognitive Models, Metonymy or sensory experience and conceptualisation, among others. The method has been implemented on individual poems as well as on a corpus of 31 poems by Seamus Heaney dealing with a common subject: the expression of myths and beliefs. Our conclusions attend both to the method design as well as its implementation, and to our findings from a detailed study of the corpus.