Conventionality, deliberateness, and creativity in metaphors: toward a typology of figurative expressions in Latin semantics

Building on recent advances in metaphor theory, this paper discusses some operational criteria that help to identify different types of metaphors whose status is defined by the interaction of three main parameters – conventionality, deliberateness, and creativity – and discusses possible strategies to distinguish one from another in an ancient language such as Latin. The first distinction to make is between conceptual metaphors, that is, recurrent cross-domain mappings that are highly conventional in a particular language, and living, creative metaphors that are the product of authorial inventiveness. The third category includes metaphors that are strategically used as metaphors to prompt the reader to think about specific comparisons, or which invite him to take a new, original perspective on the target concept within specific communicative contexts (Steen 2011). Drawing on a corpus-based analysis of all anger terms in Latin, I first discuss some illustrative examples of conceptual, deliberate and novel metaphors, and then reconstruct the historical development of the well-known anger is a hot fluid in a container schema, which serves as a case study to show how consideration of textual and cultural factors can help us gain further understanding of the emergence and conventionalization of metaphorical readings.