Investigating Idioms in the Semantic Field of Weather and Natural Phenomena: a Russian-Italian Conceptual Analysis

The phraseologies of both Russian and Italian are particularly rich of idioms in the semantic field of weather and natural phenomena that, by means of (rich) images pertaining to the latter, express abstract situations. The objective of the research is the creation of a Russian-Italian conceptual thesaurus, which is meant to systematise the investigation of this type of phraseological units. The study will be based on a cognitive approach to these figurative language units, and it will take into consideration particular issues, such as the difficulty to find, from a conceptual perspective, functional cross-language equivalents. A contrastive analysis in linguistic corpora will then prove useful in validating, through materials built in concrete contexts, the cognitive analyses previously conducted, as well as the retrieved Russian-Italian equivalent idioms.