Conceptual classification and figurative language in Ancient Egyptian: the case of emotion expression

As in many world languages, the expression of abstract concepts in ancient Egyptian relies in a great degree on the use of figurative language. The theoretical frame of this study is based on the conceptual metaphor theory. It is conceived as a corpus-based study and aims at (1) demonstrating how the characteristics of the reorganized classifier system in the New Kingdom allow for its use as complementary tool to the MIPVU method (http://www.vismet.org/metcor/documentation/MIPVU.html) for a systematic metaphor identification in a large corpus; (2) identifying cases of conceptual mappings that can be found with EMOTION as target domain in Egyptian and providing examples of linguistic and visual actualization of these mappings, whether they are based on similarity (metaphor) or contiguity (metonymy/meronymy) relations ; (3) addressing the difficulties inherent to metaphor studies in the case of a dead language coupled with consequent cultural and diachronic gaps; (4) showing the relevance of a multidisciplinary study from both the Egyptological and the linguistic perspective.
The presentation will be structured as follows: after a brief theoretical introduction, I shall show how classifiers can be useful for metaphor identification on a large corpus and, at the same time, for the study of lexical semantics in diachrony. The second part of the presentation will be dedicated to compound expressions based on the personification of the heart (jb and HAty).