Description:
In his book "Without Metaphor, No Saving God: Theology After Cognitive Linguistics", Robert Masson describes a metaphoric process by which newly accepted truths emerge: for example, in the assertion "Jesus is the Messiah," Christians reconfigure the field of meanings associated with an existing concept from the Hebrew scriptures ( messiah ) by asserting its identification with Jesus. Masson dubs this process a "tectonic equivalence" or "tectonic shift." In this paper I build on Masson‘s work by examining some of the shifts he describes as tectonic through the lens of the cognitive linguistics concepts of radial extension and polysemy. I propose that a lasting tectonic shift may be understood as a blend creating a radial extension that substantially alters the category structure of the original source frame so that the blended space comes to be understood as a central instance of that category. Such an approach allows a fruitful analysis of the similarities and differences among three example blends: god is a rock, jesus is the messiah, and jesus is god.