" 'That girl is hot, her dress is so cool, and I'm just chilling out now': Emergent metaphorical usages of temperature terms in English and Italian"

The present contribution investigates metaphorical extensions of temperature terms in English and Italian from a corpus-based perspective, focusing both on general corpora and on the language of Internet blogs. Temperature phenomena are universal and basic in human categorization. Their conceptualization, however, involves the complex interplay between external reality, bodily experience and subjective evaluation. Temperature terms can therefore be characterized as both embodied and perspectival with regard to their meaning.Moreover, words belonging to this semantic field are very frequent in use, a feature often held responsible for changes through semantic extension and application to other semantic domains. Not only do languages show remarkable differences in the number of temperature terms they have, or in the way they categorize the temperature continuum in general, but also in the extended senses of temperature terms derived through metaphor exploitation.It is by now universally accepted that adjectives such as hot, warm, cold and cool, apart from their primary referential meaning conceptually linked to a given thermal state of a particular object, are also used metaphorically, especially in association to specific human emotions, such as ‘affection is warmth’ or ‘anger is heat’ among the others. However, to what extent do such metaphorical extensions reflect universal metaphorical patterns or whether they are based on common cultural schemas is still a matter of dispute among scholars.A general tendency can be observed in metaphorical usages of temperature terms which shows that words associated to high temperatures, such as heat and hot are frequently used to talk about strong and often negative emotions. Those associated to medium and pleasant temperatures, such as warm are connected to friendly behaviour, while those referring to low temperatures, such as cool and cold tend to be associated to indifference, unfriendly behaviour or negatively charged feelings, as also suggested by Lehrer (1990). Many of these metaphors are metonymy-based, showing an experiential base in the physiological changes, such as raised body temperature and increased heart beat which accompany states of arousal.However, accounting for usages such as “He is super cool, and an amazingly talented designer”, or “I am chilling out and reminiscing on the good old days”, does not always seem so straightforward.The present contribution aims to investigate the lexical area of English and Italian temperature terms, including related nouns, adjectives and verbs, and present a corpus-based contrastive study of their metaphorisation patterns. In addition, our aim is to account for the emergence of novel and more abstract senses, through the exploitation of special types of “less conventional” metaphors. Adjectives such as cool and hot, but also verbs such as chill, or frost, have recently started to be employed in idiosyncratic ways, leading to the emergence of new senses of the terms within particular social groups, such a teen-agers or young people in general.In the first part of our contribution, we shall concentrate on the lexical meaning of temperature terms and on possible different segmentations of the temperature continuum in English and Italian. The second part of our study will present a corpus-based contrastive analysis of this lexical area in an attempt to delineate possible common pattern of metaphorisation between the two languages, by drawing special attention to their most frequent collocational patterns. Data will be gathered from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the American National Corpus (ANC) for the English language, while for Italian our study will be based on the Italian Web Corpus (ItWac), and on the Lessico dell’ Italiano Parlato (LIP).Further, in order to examine the wide range of web-based and youth-coined terms which have emerged in the last few years based on temperature terms, our works shall conduct an analysis on two blog portals in the two languages, i.e. the Technorati Blog Portal and the Blogspot one.Our study will show that, while the two languages present significant similarities in their literal usage of temperature terms, and a strong evaluative component can be outlined in both languages for both figurative and non-figurative usages of these terms, i.e. in both languages extreme temperature tend to be negatively-charged, differences can be found as well. Figurative meanings tend to overlap in Italian, where there is no complete diagrammaticity with the metaphorical usages of the corresponding English terms on the temperature spectrum. While in English, and especially in young people slanguage, cool is an umbrella term, which covers a variety of different meanings and is metaphorically associated to a wide range of emotions, in Italian either more terms, not necessarily temperature-based, need to be used to cover the various metaphorical meanings applied to hot and cool, or the two terms are used in English in spoken data.