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

We present findings from a semi-automated linguistic analysis of the letter corpus of the online State Archives of Assyria project (SAAo), focusing on a specific grammatical configuration we dub a Body Part Construction (BPC). Based on a verb with a compound prepositional phrase involving a simple human body part (e.g., alāku ina muhhi), the BPC is a basic construction for extending the semantic range of prepositional expressions in first millennium Akkadian, particularly metaphors. While specific instances of this construction have been documented in the literature, no large scale survey of them has been conducted until now. Here we present basic distributional facts about BPCs in the SAAo letter corpus, and discuss certain features of a linguistic nature and their role in constructing metaphors. We observe that most BPCs express directed motion or metaphorical variants thereof, and that such BPCs also exhibit a minor dialectal difference depending on whether they appear in Neo-Assyrian or Neo-Babylonian texts. This paper should be of interest not only for its specific findings about BPCs, but also because of the semi-automated methods used to generate its survey data that benefit from a new machine learning based computational approach.