“I was in that room!”: Conceptual integration of content and context in a writer’s vs. a prosecutor’s description of a murder

This paper compares a writer’s and a prosecutor’s description of a murder, both involving the integration of the discourse content with the communicative context. I suggest that this content-context blend is essential to the meaning and communicative effect of these discourses. This blend also seems fundamental to intersubjectivity skills such as empathy, ordinary understanding, and the use of the generic ‘you.’ I further define the Current Discourse Space as a blend of the Verbal and the Here-and-Now spaces, and suggest that the Base space always corresponds to the Here-and-Now space. The paper is based on fieldwork and is framed within Conceptual Integration Theory (Fauconnier and Turner 1998), using Liddell’s (1995) ‘grounded blends’ and Hutchins’ (2005) ‘material anchors.’