“Space oddity”: what fashion terms can reveal about English and Italian cognitive systems

This article aims to explore cognitive and cultural differences through a contrastive analysis of English and Italian fashion terms. The analy-sis places the focus on English nominal compounds that exhibit a lo-cation-located semantic structure [e.g. E. Capri trousers (It. pantaloni Capri); E. beach dress (It. copricostume), E. topcoat (It. soprabito), E. college heel (It. tacco college)] and their correspondent forms in Italian. Data extracted from three fashion dictionaries (Lorusso 2017; Canonica-Sawina 1994; Tortora & Keiser 2014) reveal that locative nominal compounds are far more frequent in English than in Italian, and that, therefore, different cognitive schemas (and morphotactic means) are used in the two languages to conceptualise the same entity. Since fashion spatial compounds are mostly metonymy and/or metaphor-based, data are analysed within a Cognitive Linguistic framework, i.e. by means of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson 1980) and metonymy theory (Radden & Kövecses 1999).