Los seres humanos y el reino animal. Análisis conceptual y contrastivo de la metáfora zoomórfica en español e italiano

This work aims at analyzing Spanish and Italian zoomorphic metaphor from a conceptual, culturological and contrastive point of view. It is divided into six chapters and includes a second volume which contains all the metaphorical expressions investigated. The first chapter introduces the main purposes of this work and presents the methodology which has been chosen for the elaboration of the corpus. The second one gives an overview of the theories on metaphor, starting from the more ancient ones up to the cognitivist approach developed in the 1980s (cfr. Lakoff e Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987; Johnson, 1987; Lakoff e Turner, 1989, ecc.). The third chapter explores the relationship between metaphor, defined as a cognitive mechanism which contributes to the conceptualization of reality, and phraseology; moreover, it emphasizes the important role that culture and direct observation play in the production of lexicalized metaphors as those analyzed in this work. The fourth chapter examines the criterion of semantic equivalence and takes into consideration recent contrastive studies centred on idioms (Dobrovol’skij, 2000; 2005; 2007; Corpas Pastor, 2001; Larreta Zulategui, 2001; López Roig, 2002; Navarro, 2008). Furthermore, some lexicographical remarks are drawn on the insertion of zoomorphic metaphors in monolingual and bilingual dictionaries.The fifth chapter presents the conceptual, culturological and contrastive analysis of the corpus: by adopting the criterion of semantic equivalence and extending the contrastive studies mentioned before, it classifies Spanish and Italian zoomorphic metaphors into three macro-levels of equivalence (total, partial and null equivalence), the second of which is made up of five levels. A final section deals with the phenomenon of false friends.The last chapter discloses some considerations concerning the results obtained through this investigation.Eventually, the second volume gathers all the metaphors analyzed with the definitions given by the monolingual, bilingual and phraseological dictionaries consulted.