Double-scope blending of associative and causal event structures in narratives

The article explores the role of Turner’s double-scope blending theory for the cognition and emotional response to narratives. I argue that narratives expected to afford aesthetic experience typically have a unified associative event structure, apart from the basic causal event structure, and that the former operates chiefly according to principles of similarity, thus being closer to metaphor than the latter. Double-scope blending seems to be essential to link narrative events associatively and then to blend this structure with the causal one, leading in effect to the complete, unified narrative. Thus, beyond its cognitive utility, it does seem to contain an important affective component which plays a role in aesthetic experience of stories.