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Neo-Assyrian Metaphors through the Telescope: Linguistic Patterns involving Body Part Constructions in the State Archives Letter Corpus

Summary

In first-millennium Akkadian, simple prepositions were increasingly replaced by compound ones built from a preposition plus a body-part noun (e.g., ina muhhi, literally "in the skull of"). These phrases often carry metaphorical meanings that cannot be predicted from their parts, but they had never been surveyed at scale. The authors define a Body Part Construction (BPC) as a verb whose prepositional modifier combines one of four basic prepositions with one of twenty body-part terms. The definition is stated in terms of syntactic dependencies, not word order. They extracted candidate BPCs from the letters of the State Archives of Assyria online (SAAo) using semi-automated queries over machine-learning morphosyntactic annotation. They then enriched the hits with manual semantic labels and analysed them with conceptual metaphor theory. Most BPCs turn out to express directed motion or metaphorical extensions of it. A regional ina/ana split separates Neo-Assyrian from Neo-Babylonian letters. About 11% of BPCs are non-trivial conceptual metaphors. The work matters for Akkadian semantics and as a reusable method for querying complex structures in digitized corpora.

Key points

  • A BPC has the schema V (X) PP BP (Y), where X is an optional direct object and Y is an optional genitive of the body part. The PP must attach to the verb, not to a nominal argument.
  • The four basic prepositions are ina, ana, ištu and itti. The body-part terms number twenty, including muhhu, pānu, libbu, qātu, šēpu and uznu.
  • Several items are deliberately excluded:
    • adi, akī/kī and basi, because they rarely combine with body parts;
    • birit and dātu, because they are too abstract.
  • Each phrase–meaning pair counts as a separate BPC. For example, alāku ina pān X yields two BPCs: "go before X" and "lead X."
  • The data come from the SAAo letter corpus. Annotation relies on the authors' treebank and deep-learning work (Ong & Gordin 2024b), and the survey dataset is published separately (Ong & Gordin 2024a, JOHD).
  • Results:
    • libbu, pānu and muhhu dominate the data.
    • Directed motion is the prevailing meaning.
    • In Sargonid-era texts, ina and ana are preferred differently by dialect, which bears on how the AŠ sign is read.
    • Roughly 11% of BPCs are genuine conceptual metaphors.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Define the target construction as a dependency pattern rather than a surface word sequence, so corpus queries are independent of word order and more precise than string search. — For Mova (tree): English compound prepositions such as "in front of" and "on top of" could be retrieved as subtree patterns over UD trees, with no sensitivity to word order or intervening words.
  • I2. Insist that the prepositional phrase attaches to the verb, not to a noun, before counting a hit, so the attachment decision is part of the construction definition. — For Mova (tree): a construction lexicon could be used as a check on PP-attachment, flagging parses where a known verb+PP idiom has been attached to a noun.
  • I3. Index constructions by phrase plus meaning, so one surface form with two readings becomes two distinct entries. — For Mova (frames): verb+preposition frames like "go before" (appear in front of vs. lead) could be stored as separate sense-indexed frames with their own role mappings, keeping disambiguation explicit.
  • I4. Constructions whose body-part nouns refer to similar regions still behave idiosyncratically (muhhu works for "go to", rēšu does not), so their meaning must be listed rather than composed. — For Mova (world): conventional metaphors could be recorded as explicit source→target domain mappings in the ontology (e.g., "prices rose" as MORE IS UP), so interpretations stay explainable.
  • I5. Use closed lists of prepositions and nouns to keep the candidate set small enough for automatic retrieval followed by partial manual checking. The authors also note that genre (letters about moving people and goods) skews the counts. — For Mova (learn): silver construction data could be harvested from closed seed lists with human or LLM review, and evaluated across several genres as a control against genre-driven distributional bias.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.36253/asiana-2543

@inproceedings{ong2024neo,
  title = {{Neo-Assyrian Metaphors through the Telescope: Linguistic Patterns involving Body Part Constructions in the State Archives Letter Corpus}},
  author = {Ong, Matthew and Gordin, Shai},
  booktitle = {Asia Anteriore Antica 6},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.36253/asiana-2543},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.36253/asiana-2543}
}

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