Studies in lexical contrastive semantics: English vis-à-vis Italian spatial particles

The work focuses on the description of the polysemy of a range of English spatial particles in a contrastive perspective with Italian. This area has always proved to be quite problematic, and the complexities of the cross-linguistic mapping have traditionally been dealt with via arbitrary accounts of correspondences and divergences. In fact, since Brugman and Lakoff’s ground-breaking work on the polysemy of over in the 80s, there have been increasing attempts in the cognitive linguistics literature to account for the different meanings of these particles in a motivated way capable of translating into psychologically plausible descriptions. However, as far as spatial particles are concerned, the main trends in the actual practice of the teaching of English as a foreign language to Italians are still largely based on idiosyncratic listings of examples. The major contribution to theoretical and applied contrastive research of the present study rests on the cognitively grounded rationale (Lexical Complexity, cf. Bertuccelli Papi and Lenci 2007) underlying the organisation of data, which attempts to overcome the limits of a chaotic view and correlated arbitrary cross-linguistic accounts of the phenomenon in question. This logic is here conceived as an overarching paradigm explicitly applied to a cognitively realistic theory of lexical representation (Principled Polysemy Networks, esp. cf. Tyler and Evans 2003). Furthermore, the Lexical Complexity framework proposes a contrastive account of conceptual structure where the organisation of data is motivated by universal parameters that are assumed to reflect the cognitive organisation of lexical systems within and across languages. Although the details of network expansion cannot be predicted, what, in fact, the proposed organisation can presumably predict is the cognitive complexity involved in the cross-linguistic mapping of particles, and possible ensuing difficulty in learning and translation.