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Article In:
Cognitive Approaches to Mind, Language and Society: Theory and description
Edited by Mario Serrano-Losada and Daniela Pettersson-Traba
[Cognitive Linguistic Studies 11:1] 2024
► pp. 159–180

Concepts that fit in a (Roman) hand

The cognitive dimension of manus ‘hand’ in Seneca’s figurative language

ORCID logo | University of Salamanca

The Roman author Lucius Anneus Seneca (4 BC–65 AC), the main representative of Stoic philosophy in Latin literature, wrote several tragedies in verse in which the Latin noun manus ‘hand’ has a remarkable incidence, almost doubling the occurrence of other terms more related to tragic themes, such as scelus ‘crime’ or mors ‘death’. This paper is based on the hypothesis that this high frequency is linked to the concept of embodiment as well as on the metonymies and metaphors used in Seneca’s figurative language to encode abstract concepts. The occurrences of the term manus in a corpus composed of Seneca’s dramatic and philosophical texts have been analysed, paying attention to the metonymic and metaphorical contexts where it appears. As a result, it has been observed that this word can refer to multiple realities such as individuals, actions, identity, control, or power.

Keywords: Latin language, embodiment, conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background: Embodiment, metaphor, and metonymy
  • 3.Corpus and general results
  • 4.Hands and metonymy
    • 4.1 the hand for the body; the body for the person
    • 4.2Hands and actions
  • 5.Hands and metaphor
  • 6.Combining metaphors & metonymies
  • 7.Discussion and final remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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