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Embodiment plays an essential role in both concrete and abstract semantic representation. As a consequence, action verbs are extensively involved in the conceptualization and linguistic encoding of figurative meanings. In the light of several theoretical frameworks, this chapter aims to investigate the mechanisms that enable verbs to acquire new abstract meanings. The analysis we present focuses specifically on the metaphorical variation of a cohesive group of five Italian action verbs codifying a movement along the vertical axis (alzare, abbassare, salire, scendere, sollevare). The results confirm the Invariance Principle worked out by Lakoff: the metaphorical mapping of an action verb is strictly constrained by the image schemas involved in its core and concrete meaning.

Cross-linguistic research has brought extensive evidence on how languages differ in their categorization of actions and events, pointing out the differences in the semantic categories they establish, their boundaries and their degree of granularity with respect to the variety of events they refer to. Verbs describing breaking events vary in terms of generality or specificity of the action description (e.g., breaking or snapping a twig) or salience of specific semantic components characterising the event (e.g., smash being associated with violent destruction) and the same event can be construed differently within the same language (e.g., crack/break an egg). In this article we set out to explore the semantic boundaries of verbs describing breaking events within and between languages. We propose a new methodology combining corpora and a video ontology, using verb pairs generally regarded as translation equivalents in bilingual dictionaries. The study contributes to research on semantic categorization and verbs correspondences between Italian and English.

Sensory-motor information is linguistically encoded by action verbs. Such verbs are not only used to express action concepts and events, but they are also pervasively exploited in the linguistic representation of abstract concepts and figurative meanings. In the light of several theoretical approaches (i.e., Embodied Theories, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Image Schema Theory), this paper analyzes the mechanisms that enable action verbs to acquire abstract meanings and that motivate the symmetries (or asymmetries) in the semantic variations of locally equivalent verbs (e.g., premere and spingere; Eng., to press and to push). The research is carried out within the IMAGACT framework and focuses on a set of four Italian action verbs encoding force (i.e., premere, spingere, tirare, and trascinare; Eng., to press, to push, to pull, and to drag). The results confirm that metaphorical extensions of action verbs are constrained by the image schemas involved in the core meaning of the verbs. Additionally, the paper shows that these image schemas are responsible for the asymmetries in the metaphorical variation of action verbs pertaining to the same semantic class (i.e., force).