Metaphorical aspects of motion verbs: a contrastive view of English and Italian.

This paper reports a preliminary investigation into the role of motion verbs in representing emotional states through a cross-linguistic observation of English and Italian By means of a questionnaire posed to L1 speakers of Italian and L1 speakers of English, it develops a mapping of descriptors for both movements and emotional states evoked by a set of motion verbs. This mapping, described through the lens of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, reveals similarities between the two languages for some aspects of an emotion but distinct differences in range of specification, i.e. in the type of manner sense associated with the emotional state.