Description

This article aims to explore cognitive and cultural differences through
a contrastive analysis of English and Italian fashion terms. The analysis
places the focus on English nominal compounds that exhibit a location-
located semantic structure [e.g. E. Capri trousers (It. pantaloni
Capri); E. beach dress (It. copricostume), E. topcoat (It. soprabito),
E. college heel (It. tacco college)] and their correspondent forms in
Italian.
Data extracted from three fashion dictionaries (Lorusso 2017;
Canonica-Sawina 1994; Tortora & Keiser 2014) reveal that locative
nominal compounds are far more frequent in English than in Italian,
and that, therefore, different cognitive schemas (and morphotactic
means) are used in the two languages to conceptualise the same entity.
Since fashion spatial compounds are mostly metonymy and/or
metaphor-based, data are analysed within a Cognitive Linguistic
framework, i.e. by means of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff &
Johnson 1980) and metonymy theory (Radden & Kövecses 1999).