Experiential metaphors in Latin - Wiley Online Library

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312 TRANSACTIONS OF THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY 109, 2011 Dative possessive option is preferred. The following examples illustrate this trend: the most ancient pattern, which is the one usually employed by Plautus, is the Dative possessive (sentences in (2a)); the counterpart with habeo begins to be widely used during the first century BCE or later (sentences in (2b)): (2) a. Et eum morbum mi esse, ut qui me opus and that.ACC malady.ACC I.DAT be.INF that I.ACC need.NOM sit insputarier? be.SUBJ.PRES spit.upon.SUBJ.PASS ‘And that I have that malady, that it’s necessary for me to be spat upon?’ (Plautus, Captivi 553) b. quicquid est ubicumque est ⁄ quodcumque agit renidet hunc whatever is whenever is whatever does smiles this.ACC habet morbum has disease.ACC ‘whatever is, whenever is ⁄ whatever he does, he smiles: he has this disease’ (Catullus, Carmina 39 incipit) (3) a. si ei forte fuisset febris if he.DAT by chance has been.SUBJ.PPF fever ‘if by chance he has had a fever’ (Plautus, Miles 720) b. si cui venae sic moventur, is habet febrim if REL veins so tremble he has fever.ACC ‘and if his veins tremble in this way, he has a fever’ (Cicero, De fato 15) (4) a. Credam, pudor si quoiquam lenoni siet I will believe shame if any pimp.DAT is ‘I will believe it, if any pimp is ashamed (lit. ‘has shame’)’ (Plautus, Curculio 58) b. Si pudorem haberes, ultimam mihi pensionem remississes If shame.ACC have last I.DAT payment send back.SUBJ.PPF ‘If you were ashamed (lit.: had shame), you would send me back the last payment’ (Seneca, De Beneficiis 29.10) My claim is in keeping with Baldi & Nuti’s study on the relationship holding between the habeo and the mihi est strategies in the domain of experience: their data show that in spite of the higher frequency of habeo x [in Early Latin], in Plautus we counted only seven occurrences where the subject of the verb is a human participant that can somehow be related to the semantic role of experiencer. This contrasts with 35 examples of this kind with mihi est x. Such an inversion of the ratio suggests that the expression of an experiencer relation, although not inconsistent with habeo, is a minor function of this verb and is a primary function of the dative construction in an early author like Plautus. (Baldi & Nuti 2010: 260–61) It is likely that the ‘have’-possessive construction gradually began to be regarded as the more expressive option. Evidence comes for instance from Donatus’ commentary of Terentius’ work Andria, where we find a valuable annotation which give us a precise idea about the greater expressiveness (plus dixit) of the metaphor in animo habeo compared to the simple verb scio: Plus dixit ‘in memoria habeo’, quam si dixisset ‘scio’, ‘‘‘I have in memory’’ means more than if one says ‘‘I know’’’ (Commentum Terentii: Andria, 40). The incongruity of possessing something abstract (e.g. a temperature) is clearly stressed by Seneca (Ep. 119.12):
FEDRIANI – EXPERIENTIAL METAPHORS IN LATIN 313 […] sic divitias habent quomodo habere dicimus febrem, cum illa nos habeat. E contrario dicere solemus ‘febris illum tenet’: eodem modo dicendum est ‘divitiae illum tenent’. ‘(these individuals) have riches just as we say that ‘‘we have a fever’’, when really the fever has us. Conversely, we are accustomed to say: ‘‘A fever grips him’’. And in the same way we should say: ‘‘Riches grip him’’.’ Besides its being perceived as more expressive, it is likely that the motivation behind the high productivity of this construction depends partially on syntactic factors: the habeo pattern models the possessive situation by accommodating it to the syntax of two-participant events that work on the basis of subject = Nominative and object = Accusative. Crucially, the transitive pattern is the most ordinary and productive in Latin, and this is why this basic transitive schema came to cover other, different types of two-participant situations (like possessive ones), gradually supplanting the Dative possessive alternative option. Evidence for the increasing generality of the ‘have’-possessive construction comes from some modern Romance languages, which select this option in order to encode a multifaceted range of experiences and feelings (sentences 5a,b) as well as other abstract and nonprototypical objects (sentence 5c; for a detailed discussion of this construction and its areal distribution in European languages and beyond, see Bossong 1998; Haspelmath 2001; Manzelli, Ramat & Roma 2002; Stolz et al. 2008: §2.3): (5) a. French J’ai faim I have hunger ‘I am hungry’, lit. ‘I have hunger’ b. Portuguese Tenho frio I have cold ‘I am cold’, lit. ‘I have cold’ c. Italian Ho fretta, sonno I have hurry, sleep ‘I am in a hurry, I am sleepy’, lit. ‘I have hurry, sleep’ The high productivity of the abstract ‘have’-construction in modern Romance languages may be understood as a consequence of the loss of the Dative possession copular construction between Late Latin and Early Romance. The ‘have’-construction describes a situation from the point of view of the possessor and is thus more consistent with depicting an Experienceroriented perspective: it is the Experiencer, instead of the stimulus, who is syntactically realized as subject. Before drawing some conclusions, let us briefly touch on the issue of a parallel Possessive construction which may have played a significant role in the spread of the Abstract Possession construction. The verb habeo, jointly with a Prepositional Phrase metaphorically denoting a cognitive entity as a container, was used in Latin also to express the semantic field of remembering. This pattern was in use already from the second century BCE, with the meaning of ‘remember’ (6) as well as ‘have in one’s mind’, also with the dynamic implication of ‘recall’ (7): (6) In memoria habeo In memory I have ‘I have in memory’ (Terentius, Andria 40)
Page 1 and 2: Transactions of the Philological So
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Page 9 and 10: in invidia sum ‘I am in envy’ (
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Page 15 and 16: (22) mi è venuta fame I.DAT is com
Page 17 and 18: schema, i.e. the two schema-specifi
Page 19 and 20: The challenge was to check whether

Experiential metaphors in Latin - Wiley Online Library

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