Metaphorical Forms of Expression of Cause in Italian

Résumé 0

The analysis of inter-clausal relations, which is traditionally confined within the narrow limits of the subordinative complex sentence containing a so-called causal clause, can be extended to include rich sets of means of expression specific for each relation, which include metaphorical nouns and verbs. Within the domain of cause, metaphorical expressions are fed by four source domains: motion, flowing of streams, development of vegetables and generation of living beings. In distributional terms, both nouns and verbs are predicators that take cause and effect as arguments, mainly of nominal form. The same metaphorical nouns and verbs are ready to express retrospective motives and purposes under different structural conditions. If we compare the forms of expression of cause and purpose, it is interesting to underline the absence, in the former case, of both complex prepositions and anaphoric adverbials encapsulating metaphorical nouns, whose richness is one of the most typical features among the forms of expression of purpose.