Riflessioni sulla lettura di dati linguistici antichi alla luce delle metafore concettuali e della teoria dell’embodiment

As is known, the application of diachronic cognitive semantics to Indo-European lin- guistics often collides with obvious theoretical limits but can offer, if used with due caution, new insights or further confirmations to hypotheses already proposed. The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate some ancient linguistic data (drawn in particular from Hittite) that can suggest interpretations connected with conceptual metaphors (in the sense of Lakoff & Johnson 1980) and with the theory of Embodiment (Lakoff & Johnson 1999 etc.). Despite the scarce availability of data, and with the prudence that must always be used when analyzing corpus languages, it is considered possible to frame some metaphorical expressions of antiquity within an interpretative model based on some theoretical prerequisites offered by cognitive linguistics, which sees in the linguistic epiphe- nomena the concrete realizations of our system of relating spatially (and, therefore, mentally) to the external world and in the ‘embodied knowledge’ the connection point between mind and language