Experiential metaphors in Latin - Wiley Online Library

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(7) Patrue, facito in memoria habeas, tuam maiorem filiam
Father.VOC do.IMP in memory have your older.ACC daughter.ACC
mihi te despondisse
I.DAT you.ACC promise.in.marriage.INF
‘Uncle, see you remember that you have promised me your older daughter’
(Plautus, Poenulus 1278)
Example (8) below shows further figurative use within the metaphorical schema in animo
habere. In this case, the concrete referent aquam ‘water’ is also metaphorically thought of as
an abstract entity:
(8) aquam te in animo habere
water you.ACC in mind have.INF
‘you have water in your mind’ (Lucilius, Sat. Fragm. 764)
To sum up, in animo habeo and in memoria habeo are frequently attested in my corpus (45 and
6 tokens respectively). Conceivably, this construction may have initially established the
abstract interpretation of the verb habeo with non-prototypical locations and ⁄ or objects,
subsequently giving rise to other metaphorical exploitations.
4. STATES ARE CONTAINERS: A FULLY PRODUCTIVE SCHEMA IN LATIN
Within this metaphor, abstract mental states are interpreted as situations placed in reality: thus,
the psychological world as experienced and conceptualized by sentient humans is figuratively
expressed in terms of concrete entities as they exist in the physical environment. In this case, the
source domain is a container and the target domain, metaphorically actualized in concrete
places, can involve several kinds of psychological states. Consider some English examples:
He is in love.
She is in a rage.
My uncle is in despair.
TRANSACTIONS OF THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY 109, 2011
As can be noted, these metaphors are based on complex structures made up of a stative verb
and a figurative prepositional phrase which has a spatial origin.
This metaphorical mapping is well exploited in Latin. Several figurative schemas featuring
the container image are in fact attested (I provide in brackets their token frequency in my
corpus):
in dubio sum ‘I am in doubt’ (3 tokens)
in dubio haereo ‘I am stuck in doubt’ (1)
in dubio iaceo ‘I lie in doubt’ (1)
in dubio sto ‘I stand in doubt’ (1)
in morbo sum ‘I am in disease’ (6)
in morbo cubo ‘I lie in sickness’ (1)
in timore sum ‘I am in fear’ (4)
in terrore sum ‘I am in fear’ (1)
in metu sum ‘I am in fear’ (11)
in aegritudine sum ‘I am in sickness’ (4)
in gaudio sum ‘I am in joy’ (1)