Conceptualising Weather and Natural Phenomena through Russian and Italian Idioms: Towards a Contrastive Thesaurus

Idioms constitute a productive class of phraseological units and are widely used in both Italian and Russian. Among the semantic fields represented in idiomatic expressions, weather and natural phenomena occupy a prominent position in the conceptual systems of both languages, appearing in both literal and figurative uses. Adopting a cognitive-linguistic framework and drawing on corpus-linguistic methodologies, this research investigates and compares Italian and Russian idioms with the aim of identifying and systematizing the conceptualizations underlying their usage. The ultimate objective is the development of a thesaurus of conceptual patterns emerging from the analysis of weather-related idioms in the two languages.