The conceptual structure which arises in the blended space in an integration network due to the process known as conceptual integration. The structure is emergent or novel as it is not a property of any of the input spaces, taken individually, that comprise an integration network.

To illustrate consider the metaphoric blend : That surgeon is a butcher. Although butchery is a highly skilled profession, involving considerable expertise and skill including detailed knowledge of the anatomy of particular animals, knowledge of different cuts of meat and so on, by conceptualizing a surgeon as a butcher we are evaluating the surgeon as incompetent.

Blending theory is able to account for the negative assessment arising from understanding a surgeon in terms of a butcher by allowing for emergent structure.

While a blend contains structure projected from both inputs, it also contains additional structure projected from neither. In the input space for butcher, we have a highly skilled professional. However, in the blended space, these skills are inappropriate for performing surgery on human patients. While surgeons attempt to save lives, butchers perform their work on dead animals. While the activity performed by butchers is dismembering, the activity performed by surgeons typically involves repair and reconstruction and so on.

The consequence of these contrasts is that in the blended space a surgeon who is assessed as a butcher brings inappropriate skills and indeed goals to the task at hand and is therefore incompetent. This emergent meaning of incompetence represents the additional structure provided by the blend. The emergent structure provided by the blend includes the structure copied from the input spaces together with the emergent structure relating to a surgeon who performs an operation using the skills of butchery and is therefore incompetent. This individual does not exist in either of the input spaces. The structure in the blend is ‘emergent’ because it emerges from ‘adding together’ structure from the inputs to produce an entity unique to the blend. Furthermore, it is precisely by virtue of the mismatch between goal (healing) and means (butchery), which exists only in the blend, that the inference of incompetence arises. This means that all the structure in the blend can be described as emergent, even though its ‘ingredients’ are provided by the input spaces.

Emergent structure is a function of three of the constitutive processes of blending: composition, pattern completion and elaboration (1).