Motion event encoding in Russian in contrast with Italian: the role of prefixation and its means of expression in Italian.

The encoding of motion events has been and is the focus of numerous studies from both a typological and a cognitive perspective. Our work builds on the research conducted by Leonard Talmy and other scholars such as Dan I. Slobin in the description of the components of a motion event and the study of their expression from a cross-linguistic point of view. Starting from the classification proposed by Leonard Talmy, according to which languages can be traced back to two models of lexicalisation of the path of motion (satellite languages vs. verb-framed languages), in the course of the contrastive analysis it is observed how Russian and Italian, which can be traced back to the group of satellite languages and verb-framed languages respectively, can encode the components of a motion event in different ways. Particular attention is devoted to the role of verbal prefixation in the expression of the path of motion. Our work is composed as follows: an introduction, three chapters, conclusions and a reference list. The first chapter is devoted to presenting the state of the art and the theoretical framework that supports our contrastive study. The second chapter describes the linguistic means available to the two languages considered for expressing a motion event. The third chapter presents the contrastive analysis based on examples from the parallel Russian-Italian corpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language. In the course of our contrastive analysis, two important facts emerge: the complex spatial semantics of Russian verbal prefixes characterised by the presence of several components that may or may not activate depending on the context, and the variety of strategies that can be applied in Italian to convey the semantics of Russian prefixed verbs of motion.