Experiential metaphors in Latin - Wiley Online Library

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TRANSACTIONS OF THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY 109, 2011
Table 2. Possible fillers in Motion, Location and Possession metaphors
Motion Location Possession
morbus morbus morbus
invidia invidia invidia
aegritudo aegritudo aegritudo
dubium dubium dubium
febris febris
insania insania
ira ira
odium odium
fames fames
dementiam
rabiem
memoria
metus metus
gaudium gaudium
desiderium desiderium
dolor dolor
timor
terror
maestitia
maeror
frigus
fastidium
sitis
pudor
verecundia
laetitia
alternative to express inchoative processes and a valid strategy for imposing a dynamic
perspective on stative feelings. After all, this alternation in coding strategies is to be expected in
semantic fields concerning experience, because the Experiencer–Stimulus relations show a wide
variation of argument linking patterns and alternative metaphorical ways of conceptualizing
the same experience (e.g. Bossong 1998; Croft 1998; Verhoeven 2007). Usually, languages do
not limit themselves to a single syntactic option to conceptualise a situation with a one-to-one
mapping between function and form, but instead display a wide inventory of lexical and
syntactic strategies that allow a given situation to be portrayed in alternative ways (see
Langacker 1991: 330). Conceivably, limits to variation do exist: in our case, for instance, the
fact that timor ‘fear’, terror ‘fright’, pavor ‘fear’ and frigor ‘cold’ only occur with the Location
schema tells us that fear and cold were preferably conceived of as containers ‘placed’ in the real
world. Thus, the aspectual focus was cast on their stativity, durativity and atelicity, apparently
excluding any type of inchoative reading. This shows that, generally speaking, experiential
metaphors and grammatical constructions tend to be associated along preferred paths.
In conclusion, in this article I have shown that tools provided by the cognitivist framework
can shed considerable light on the synchronic and diachronic organization of a specific
metaphorical domain, even for a ‘dead’ language such as Latin. From a theoretical
perspective, the present cognitivist corpus-based study has allowed (i) to cover a wider range of
data; (ii) to shed light on a patterned variation in Latin experiential metaphors, and to show
that this variation is not randomly but rather conceptually motivated; (iii) to systematically
describe some metaphoric networks in terms of productivity and schematicity, and to
individuate which patterns worked as models for further extensions; (iv) to identify semantic
and aspectual constraints in the applicability of different sources to different target domains,
i.e. to highlight emotion-specific metaphors (cf. Stefanowitsch 2005b); and (v) to provide
evidence for the cross-cultural reality of metaphorical mappings, which suggested that an
experience can be metaphorically conceptualised in the same way across both space and time.