ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I outline an approach to the study of ancient Roman culture that I call “Roman cultural semantics”. Drawing especially on Lakovian conceptual metaphor theory and the theory of folk models in modern cognitive anthropology, my methodology uses patterns of conventionalized figurative expression in Latin to reconstruct the conceptual models that characterize Roman culture and that organize and shape Roman society’s symbolic activities. This kind of approach provides a cognitively realistic, humanly plausible account of how Latin speakers’ language, thought, and behavior across seemingly unrelated contexts of social practice fit together under a coherent worldview. By showing how culture-specific ways of understanding are scaffolded on human-universal processes of cognition, this approach in fact affords exactly the sort of etic framework needed to produce emic analyses of Roman culture, especially when incorporating a comparative perspective. I illustrate the approach through a study of Roman culture’s metaphors of “meaning” and “ambiguity”.
