Cognitive patterns in Greek poetic metaphors of emotion: A diachronic approach

Fecha de publicación: 03-ago-2013 15:31:19

Poetic imagery systematically integrates archetypical emotion scenes with schematic narratives grounded on spatial cognition. These conceptual templates underlie a wide variety of poetic metaphors. For example, an erotic emission coming from the body or from a superior force (as in the arrows of love, or a light or scent from the beloved) has been repeatedly used to conceptualize love causation in literature, everyday language, or rituals, from Antiquity to the twentieth century.

To analyze these emotion discourses, we need both a historical and a cognitive perspective. Studies of the language of emotions often incur in Anglocentrism and neglect cultural diachrony in their search for universal patterns. This paper introduces a more complex cognitive model for the study of productive recipes of poetic creativity, and explores the wide diachrony of Greek poetry, with an emphasis on ancient and medieval texts.

Since Greek culture has been at a geographical and historical crossroad for three millennia, the study is enriched through comparison with literary traditions from East and West. Crucially, the instantiation of these conceptual templates varies significantly across individuals, communities and contexts, thus providing significant data about the history of emotion concepts. These conceptual blends of emotional and spatial meanings have a history, which sometimes can be traced back to the conceptual materials and cultural settings from which they arose. By using Blending Theory’s dynamic model for meaning construction, the history of emotions can take an important step towards becoming a cognitive social science.

Pagán Cánovas, C. In review. Conceptual Integration Templates in Greek Poetic Metaphors of Emotion: A Diachronic Approach. For J. E. Díaz Vera (ed) Metaphor and Metonymy through Time and Cultures, to be reviewed for the Cognitive Linguistics Research Series, Mouton de Gruyter.

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