A love story. A culturally informed diachronic account of love metaphors between Latin and Italian

Building on the extensive body of cognitive linguistic literature on emotion concepts, this chapter presents a corpus-based investigation of the metaphorical uses of the word amor(e) (‘love’) in the long diachrony from Latin to Italian. The analysis reveals the persistence of metaphorical patterns as well as their variation over time, in terms of both type and token frequency. On the basis of the data discussed, we suggest how this kind of historical research can benefit from central tenets of cognitive linguistics and how, in turn, historical analyses can help refine some assumptions generally taken for granted by cognitivist scholars.