METAPHORS AND ACTIONS: AN IMAGE-SCHEMATIC APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS OF ITALIAN ACTION VERBS' SEMANTICS

Action verbs encode typologically different action concepts and events (e.g., primary variation: Panunzi & Moneglia 2004). They may, in fact, refer to a large array of actions, each one of which is defined by specific motor schemas, perceptual properties, and spatial relationships. Yet, action verbs are also pervasively used in non-strictly action contexts, to express abstract concepts and convey figurative meanings (e.g., marked variation: Brown 2014). These predicates, thus, contain a significant amount of information not only about how action concepts and events are linguistically categorized, but also about the way metaphorical processes are represented in natural language. The exploration of the role that action verbs play in the representation of abstract thinking and, more in particular, in the encoding of metaphorical contents is the immediate aim of this thesis. From this point of view, the description of the kind of bond that ties together concrete and metaphorical uses of a given action verb stands as a first step toward a greater understanding of how sensory-motor information is re-used, in language, to shape highly abstract domains of knowledge. Moreover, the observation of action verbs’ behavior in metaphorical contexts enhances the understanding of how conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson 1980) may be encoded through language. Finally, the exploration of the semantic structure of single action verbs may shed light on the metaphorical potential of verbs that recur in the same linguistic and pragmatic contexts to encode the same events (e.g., local equivalent verbs). The analysis of the metaphorical variation of action verbs was limited to two internally cohesive groups of Italian verbs, one clustering together verbs that refer to vertically oriented actions (alzare, ‘to raise’; abbassare, ‘to lower’; salire, ‘to rise’; scendere, ‘to descend’; sollevare, ‘to lift’) and the other clustering verbs that refer to force patterns (premere, ‘to press’; spingere, ‘to push’; tirare, ‘to pull’; trascinare ‘to drag’). The annotation was started with the extraction of about 11,000 occurrences from Italian spoken corpora, such as IMAGACT and Opus (Italian subtitles). From these, a smaller set of sentences (about 600) was selected and annotated in detail. For each verb, metaphorical uses were gathered in classes organized by similarity, with respect to the meaning and the concept denoted. Each metaphorical class was associated to at least one conceptual metaphor (Lakoff et al. 1991) and to salient differential traits, presented in the form of image-schematic components (Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987). Finally, the metaphorical variation of each action verb was evaluated and compared to that of the other verbs included in the same group (e.g., alzare vs. sollevare). Overall, this thesis offers a potential approach to the analysis of those phenomena that seem to systematically operate in the processes of sense extension within the semantic variation of action verbs, taking Italian as a case study. In this frame, the image-schematic investigation of the semantic mechanisms that are involved in processes of meaning construction and conveyance stands as an attempt to motivate, on a purely semantic level, the apparent discrepancies existing between the axes of the semantics of action and of metaphorical extension of a given action verb.