This chapter examines the ways in which French philosopher Gilles Deleuze offers conceptual resources for an enactive account of language, in particular his extensive consideration of language in The Logic of Sense. Specifically, Deleuze’s distinction between the nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s portmanteau creations and that of Antonin Artaud’s “transla- tion” of Carroll’s Jabberwocky highlights the need for an enactive, rather than merely embodied, approach to sense-making, particularly with regard to the general category of what Jakobson and Halle (1956) call “sound (...) symbolism”. (shrink)

For forty years, American priest and friar Reginald Foster, O.C.D., worked in the Latin Letters office of the Roman Curia’s Secretary of State in Vatican City. As Latinist of four popes, he soon emerged as an internationally recognized authority on the Latin language—some have said, the internationally recognized authority, consulted by scholars, priests, and laymen worldwide. In 1986, he began teaching an annual summer Latin course that attracted advanced students and professors from around the globe. This volume gathers contributions from (...) some of his many students in honor of his enduring influence and achievements. Its chapters explore a wide range of linguistic and literary evidence from antiquity to the present day in a variety of theoretical perspectives. If the motivation for putting together this collection has been to reflect (and reflect upon) Foster’s influences on Latin scholarship and pedagogy, its title alludes—via the medieval folk etymology of the word labyrinthus (“quasi labor intus”)—to its theme: ambiguity in Latin literature. (shrink)

Use of rhetorical figures has been an element of persuasive speech at least since Gorgias of Leontini, for whom such deliberate deviations from ordinary literal language were a defining feature of what he called the ‘psychagogic art’. But must we consider figures of speech limited to an ornamental and merely stylistic function, as some ancient and still many modern theorists suggest? Not according to contemporary cognitive rhetoric, which proposes that figures of speech can play a fundamentally argumentative role in speech (...) by evoking a level of shared meaning between speaker and listener, and simultaneously by affording the possibility of reorganizing this common ground. This paper argues that, in Latin literature, zeugma—the ‘linking together’ of two elements with a third that is semantically compatible with only one of them—can and very often does operate argumentatively, and that it does so by surfacing figurative relationships that normally remain below the conscious awareness of Latin speakers and by imparting a certain structure to these relationships. What very often motivates the selection of elements within zeugma—and what makes zeugma more than simply a stylistic device—are in fact metaphorical structures that are highly conventionalized in Latin's semantic system. In tapping into symbolic associations that are deeply entrenched in the language and thought of Latin speakers, zeugma therefore provided a ready-made device for constructing arguments in context. (shrink)

Latin dē, both in its prepositional and preverbal form, is characterized by multiple, varied, and seemingly unrelated senses. Unlike proposition-based lexicographical and historical linguistic accounts, an image-schematic definition systematically explains the range of its literal, physical senses and of its figurative, abstract senses, as well as the relations between them. Defining dē in terms of an image-schematic “scenario” portraying two entities connected by a directional trajectory in fact accommodates the co-existence of even antonymous senses within this word's semantic structure and (...) apparently radical divergences from its presumed essential literal meaning in Latin literature, due to the susceptibility of image schemas to “embodied” transformations such as perspective shifts and profiling effects. Dē's more abstract senses may also be linked in this way to widespread metaphorical patterns in Latin, showing that these senses are not haphazard but highly motivated semantically—with significant implications for lexicography, and literary and cultural history. (shrink)