Linguistica Cognitiva e analisi retorica: indicazioni per un percorso sulla metafora nella didattica della lingua.

This thesis develops the Cognitive Linguisticsࢠtheoretical claims about metaphor and puts forward a possible application of them in the didactic field. The frame of research is Cognitive Linguistics and its fundamental features: the integrated perspective, the embodiment, the semantic centrality, the attention to psycholinguistics and neurosciences. In this frame an idea of metaphor emerges as a meeting point between thought and language, as a criterion for organizing thoughts and an important tool in understanding and learning processes. In teaching, we can conceive metaphor both as a didactic tool and as the object of reflection. The cognitive approach can provide some useful indications about the organization of a course on metaphor. In this work, Iࢠm going to study the use of non-verbal stimuli in improving metaphorical competence of middle school students. I chose to work on advertisements for two reasons: the large use of rhetorical strategies in advertising and the communicative peculiarities of the genre, that enable us to solve instances of ambiguity more easily than other genres. A workshop is presented, which is aimed to improve the studentsࢠmetaphorical competence, by two complementary strategies: on one hand, an explanation based on cognitive models, applied both to terminology and to the method of analysis (usage-based approach); on the other hand, a training with pictorial metaphors employed in advertising, including both analytical and productive tasks. I used a test, divided into specific tasks, to monitor objectively the studentsࢠprogress after the training, but also to record the degree of difficulty faced subsequent to the context (literary or conventional type) and to the metaphorsࢠlinguistic form (nominal, adjective, verbal).