Konzeptuelle Metaphern zwischen Sprachen und Fachtextsorten. Das Deutsche und das Italienische in der psychologischen Lehre und Popularisierung

This work builds on the well-established assumption in cognitive linguistic research that much scientific knowledge is structured and linguistically encoded metaphorically. On the one hand, it aims to identify the most widely used conceptual metaphors in the Italian and German language of psychology in reference to the closely interrelated concepts of depression, anxiety, and trauma. The objective is to highlight shared and divergent thought patterns revealed in language use. On the other hand, it aims to disclose how these patterns manifest at two levels of scientific communication: academic training and popularisation. Ultimately, the purpose of this second step is to establish a theoretical and empirical foundation for systematically integrating the study of metaphor into the classification of text genres. The collected data reveal, in fact, that metaphor use reflects the functional aspects of specialised text genres that are also decisive for their pragmatic classification.