Publications

Publication details [#12826]

Pagán Cánovas , Cristóbal . 2011. The Genesis of the Arrows of Love: Diachronic Conceptual Integration in Greek Mythology. American Journal of Philology 132 (4) : 553–579. 27 pp.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
JSTOR

Abstract

This paper tackles the question of how the personification of love as an archer, pervasive as it may be fro’m antiquity until nowadays in literature, the arts, cartoons and everyday language, has conceptually and culturally emerged. After ruling out previous analyses from a philological and cognitive linguistic standpoint, the author offers a novel understanding of “Love the Archer” in terms of a conceptual integration network that recruits the so-called Abstract Cause Personification blend and an image-schema of emission, merged together in cultural diachrony. This approach shows that “Love the Archer” shares an underlying conceptual structure with “Death the Grim Reaper”, both of which personify significant events in human life through embodied representations of causation and agency, as well as cultural materials, such as the scythe and the arrow.