A Roman Folk Model of the Mind

Abstract

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.

1. Fundamentals for a Cognitive Semantics of Latin: Image Schemas and Metaphor in the Meaning of the Roman Animus-concept

“…39 What accounts for Latin speakers' privileged conceptualization of courage and cowardice in such markedly embodied terms is, I would suggest, the particular symbolic affordances that the human body seems to have presented to them for representing and understanding psychological and emotional phenomena of all sorts. I have shown elsewhere the Latin speakers' understanding of most aspects of mental activity: Short (2012) and. some inner correspondence of spirit with your informants", the result of which would be something like the proverbial "ethnography of witchcraft written by a witch".…”

Comparativism Then and Now

“…39 Latin's "wandering" metaphor, conversely, participates in a large-scale metaphorical pattern in which not only "mistakenness" and "falseness" but also "correctness" and "trueness"-and indeed many other aspects of mental life-are expressed in terms of movement in physical space, as a feature of everyday speech (cf. Short 2012). It structures polysemy across the lexicon of "wandering", for instance: not only erro but also of vagor and palor can be used figuratively in the sense of "mistaking".…”