Whereas communication is today conceived as the “transmission” of “signals” along a “conduit,” Latin speakers’ understanding of this concept was delivered by a system of metaphors recruiting images of cooking, serving, eating, and digesting food. More than providing simply colorful ways of speaking about thought and speech, however, these alimentary metaphors functioned together to deliver a coherent overall model of how mental representations come to be verbally shared among individuals. While it is not the only metaphorical model available to Latin speakers in conceptualizing communication, the alimentary model also represents a privileged model that informs scholarly and philosophical theorizing.
In Latin, ways of speaking about the mind are largely metaphorical. Moreover, while the metaphors that deliver this vocabulary are drawn from different sources, they reflect a coherent “folk model” of the mind that motivates and structures certain dimensions of Roman society’s thought and behavior. In this paper, I present evidence of Latin speakers’ metaphorical conceptualization of the mental domain and reconstruct the folk model from this evidence. Finally, in a culturally comparative perspective, I explore how Latin speakers’ “preferential conceptualization” of mental activity in terms of spatial motion conditions Roman understandings of the literary tradition and of literary imitation.
As cognitive structures that capture patterns of sensorimotor experience, image schemas and their metaphorical interpretations not only deliver meaning in Latin's semantic system, but also organize other forms of Roman symbolic representation. This paper builds on Maurizio Bettini's analysis of Latin's metaphorical expression of time in terms of linear spatial relations by tracing the structuring effects of these metaphors on other aspects of Roman social practice, including its artistic practice. As I argue, apart from their linguistic manifestations, these metaphors motivate the "axial" configurations of certain socially instituted genealogical representations, as well as provide principles of organization for the construction and decoration of material objects.
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Use of rhetorical figures has been an element of persuasive speech at least since Gorgias of Leontini, for whom such deliberate deviations from ordinary literal language were a defining feature of what he called the ‘psychagogic art’. But must we consider figures of speech limited to an ornamental and merely stylistic function, as some ancient and still many modern theorists suggest? Not according to contemporary cognitive rhetoric, which proposes that figures of speech can play a fundamentally argumentative role in speech by evoking a level of shared meaning between speaker and listener, and simultaneously by affording the possibility of reorganizing this common ground. This paper argues that, in Latin literature, zeugma—the ‘linking together’ of two elements (usually nouns or prepositional phrases) with a third (usually a verb) that is semantically compatible with only one of them—can and very often does operate argumentatively, and that it does so by surfacing figurative relationships that normally remain below the conscious awareness of Latin speakers and by imparting a certain structure to these relationships. What very often motivates the selection of elements within zeugma—and what makes zeugma more than simply a stylistic device—are in fact metaphorical structures that are highly conventionalized in Latin's semantic system. In tapping into symbolic associations that are deeply entrenched in the language and thought of Latin speakers, zeugma therefore provided a ready-made device for constructing arguments in context.
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