Experiential metaphors in Latin - Wiley Online Library

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The remainder of this article is organised as follows. Section 3 provides an analysis of
the metaphorical schema EXPERIENCES ARE THINGS POSSESSED, while section 4 is particularly
concerned with investigating the STATES ARE CONTAINERS patterns. Section 5 looks at the
EVENTS ARE MOVEMENTS metaphor. I close the paper with a summary of its main points
and conclusions, with a view to providing some insights into the fruitful relation
between cognitive linguistics, a corpus-based approach to metaphors, and classical
philology (§6).
3. THE POSSESSIVE CONSTRUCTION: A CASE OF DIACHRONIC GROWTH IN PRODUCTIVITY
‘It is widely appreciated that the linguistic category of possession does not reduce to any
single, familiar value, such as ownership. A moment’s thought reveals the extraordinary
variety of the relationships coded by possessive constructions’ (Langacker 1991: 169). This
point is simple but worth stressing: experiencing something can be conceived through the
basic event schema of possessing something (Nikiforidou 1991: §3.2; Stolz et al. 2008:
108). What we have is a situation of typological variation, in the sense that languages
extend the possessive construction type into neighbouring semantic domains to varying
degrees.
However, possessing an experience is something different from possessing, let us say, a
bicycle. In prototypical possession, the possessor is by definition animate, the possessum is
concrete and the possessor can use the possessum. In having an experience, the only
feature which is maintained concerns the animacy of the possessor (i.e. the Experiencer),
all other things being altered (Heine 1997). Given the impalpable essence of experiential
objects, linguists have usually maintained the general label of Abstract Possession to refer
to this peculiar construction to indicate that it lacks most of the semantic features that
tend to show up in the case of prototypical possession (Ko¨ nig & Haspelmath 1998;
Stassen 2009). The Abstract Possession construction interacts transitively with the IDEAS
ARE OBJECTS METAPHOR (Ko¨ vecses 2000: 89), where the mind is conceptualized as something
that looks like a container, while ideas, feelings and beliefs are conceived of as objects
kept in it. As Seiler points out, ‘after all, abstract nouns pertain to a linguistic technique
that allows actions and processes to be treated as if they were things’ (Seiler 1983: 52), as
in the following examples from English:
We share our ideas.
I gave the idea to my mother.
I have an idea.
I took the idea from John.
TRANSACTIONS OF THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY 109, 2011
As is well known, in Latin two different strategies are used to encode possession: the Dative
possession copular construction (e.g. liber mihi est ‘I have a book’, lit. ‘a book me.DAT is’)
and the transitive construction with the verb habeo ‘I have’. In the former type, the Dativemarked
possessor is ascribed a possessum: this is a very ancient option in Indo-European and
displays several parallel structures in many other Indo-European languages (Ernout &
Thomas 1972 [1951]: 73; Benveniste 1960: 223; on the two competing strategies in Latin, see
Magni 1999; Baldi & Nuti 2010: esp. §2). As we see below, the ‘have’-possessive construction
started out as more concrete, preferably used to denote temporary possession, subsequently
developing more abstract senses such as experiencing physical feelings and emotions (cf. e.g.
Lo¨ fstedt 1963; see also Baldi 2002).
Latin Experiential constructions featuring either or both the possessive schemas are listed
below: