La metafora nel linguaggio automobilistico come strumento per l’immaginazione e la concettualizzazione
The metaphor in automotive language as a tool for imagination and conceptualization

Summary/Abstract: The advanced automotive industry and the rapid evolution of high-performance technology have begun to change the relationship between man and the car, which was initially just a practical and functional object. In the descriptions of oldtimer and contemporary cars we have noticed that they are no longer understood as means of transport, but as animated beings endowed with predominantly human emotions, temperament and character. These means of transport have marked more than a century of the history of coexistence with man and this is the reason why man has also begun to recognize his own actions and peculiarities in the characteristics and technical performance of cars. This link has affected the lexicon by increasing the number of metaphors used in both automotive and common language, heralding the emergence of a new era of mankind that is less and less "human" and more "technical". Our research was conducted on a substantial corpus of the most prestigious Italian car magazines, in which we identified various types of metaphors according to the classification developed in the field of cognitive linguistics. One of the objectives of this research is to discover to what extent the technical evolutions of motoring have left their traces on the quantity and nature of the metaphors used, as well as on the common vocabulary.

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