Emotions in the Household: Emotion Words and Metaphors in Domesday Book Personal Names.

This paper presents an analysis of the set of emotion-related personal names recorded in the Domesday Book. Through the fine-grained analysis of the themes used in these names, this paper proposes a semantic description of late Old English personal names, which have been classified into the following seven name sub-categories: happiness, joy, love, tenderness, pride, anger, and fear. This analysis shows that emotion-related vocabulary was a favorite personal name element in post-Conquest England. Furthermore, it proposes some of the general tendencies behind name-giving practices, especially in relation to (i) gender distribution of emotion themes and concepts and (ii) frequent lexical combinations of emotion-related themes. Finally, the paper offers an interpretation of the metaphorization processes that motivated the development of some of these combinations of words and their usage as personal names in Anglo-Saxon England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]