Dolor Metaphors in Latin: What a Corpus-Based Approach to Ancient Sources Can (and Cannot) Tell Us

This study offers a quantitative and qualitative analysis of dolor metaphors in Latin, relying on two different approaches and benefiting from the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of both. The first is a corpus-based analysis of keywords and focuses on their attestation in a large sample of texts. A study that is keyword-based allows the researcher to retrieve all attestations of the most prominent lexeme in a given data set and to provide a systematic account of word usage in context. Emotion concepts, however, have a multifaceted linguistic structure that is also instantiated in figurative patterns and narrative representations. Words, then, constitute just one aspect of the conceptualization of the emotions. The second approach is a literary-informed analysis of emotional narratives and requires the careful reading of selected texts. In this latter methodology, the aim is to explore the symbolic imagery embedded in the narration of an emotional episode, regardless of its linguistic packaging. The chapter shows that these two perspectives can and should be integrated in the analysis of metaphors in ancient languages and that in combination the two approaches (lexical and narratival) effectively contribute to unveiling the nature and understanding of dolor within the Roman symbolic system.