deixis and multiple blends: the role of recursion in meaning construction

Current paper draws on Mental Spaces Theory to analyze first and second person singular pronouns (1PS and 2PS, respectively) in British English and Brazilian Portuguese. The analysis is based on attested data obtained from electronic corpora (the British National Corpus for British English and the Portuguese Corpus for Brazilian Portuguese). The main claim is that 1PS and 2PS pronouns are cognitively complex and prompt for elaborate meaning construction. First, it is argued that 1PS and 2PS pronouns conventional meanings (i.e., reference to the speaker and hearer) is emergent from simplex conceptual integration networks. Secondly, evidence is brought to the fact that these pronouns also show non-conventional meanings which may rise recursively through multiple blending.