Abstract:

Mourning poetry, written in Latin by students and professors of Vilnius Jesuit Academy, was an important part of the 16-17th c. noble funeral rite in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. According to genre conventions, authors were tasked with glorifying and mourning the dead, as well as consoling their relatives. The central theme of mourning poetry was death, therefore the corpus of the funeral poetry provides an appropriate material for the reconstruction of the conceptual metaphors of death.

The presentation is based on the assumption that the analysis of the lexical expressions of death concept in Latin language and their juxtaposition with the same devices in Lithuanian language may be an applicable method for teaching and learning Latin language. In addition, the literary context which manifests the synthesis of the Classical and the Christian traditions helps students to better understand the peculiarities of the concept of death in the epoch of Baroque.
The approach aims to present an efficient method for teaching and learning Latin language, substantiated by identification of conceptual metaphors of death, providing comparative analysis of their lexical expressions in Latin and Lithuanian, including contextual knowledge.

The analysis of the conceptualization of death in mourning poetry is based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) developed by Lacoff and Johnson (1980, 2003), Lacoff and Turner (1989) and the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) presented by Steen (2010). Additionally, recent studies on the cross-linguistic research of conceptual metaphors of death (Gathigia et al. 2018) have been taken into consideration.

The investigation of conceptual metaphors - DEATH IS DEPARTURE, DEATH IS ARRIVAL, DEATH IS FALL, etc. - accompanied by the juxtaposition and comparison of their lexical manifestations in Latin and Lithuanian languages demonstrates the principles of an engaging and effective Latin language teaching method.

Keywords:

Mourning poetry, conceptual metaphors of death, Latin language teaching.