Simona BrunettiIdiome, Wissen und Metaphern aus dem Begriffsfeld VERRÜCKTSEIN im Deutschen und im Italienischen

About this book deutschenglish

It is a widely shared assessment in the phraseology that cognitive models and knowledge structures contribute to uncover the semantic motivation of figurative expressions of a language. Idioms as important figurative units have a fixed lexical component structure, which contains relevant traces of their lexicalized meaning. Cognitive studies of idiomacity show that several analogies and convergences in the conceptual structure of idiomatic phrases can be found. What about the culture-specificity? In her work the authoress has developed a model which simultaneously uses the cognitive tools "knowledge" and "metaphor" to answer the cultural specific question. The subject of investigation is represented from Italian and German expressions of madness, which are being analyzed on both levels, conceptual and structural-semantic. An important part of this work consists in a diachronic history of madness, which underlines the cultural, social and philosophical aspects of what was once an exclusive medical phenomenon. This description will provide significant data concerning the origin of knowledge structures about madness. They represent in connection with metaphorical processes fundamental properties of the conceptual structure of idioms. A cooperative integration of knowledge and metaphors, of diachrony and synchrony, proves to be a successful approach to bilingual idiomatic investigation. Above all, the target of obtaining linguistic contrastive results can be achieved within the framework of the German-Italian contrastive phraseology.