Architetture testuali. Simmetrie e asimmetrie a confronto

Вокруг да oколо. Semantic geometries of the circleThis paper presents a corpus-based, contrastive analysis of two prepositions вокруг and intorno a.The article first considers the points of contact between the prepositions on the basis of their circular spatial configuration and the logical-semantic relations they imply, as well as in the light of the three categories of localisation, deixis and orientation, identifying their main functions. Next, the particular categorial nature of intorno a was considered as a modifier of a quantity by approximation and rounding, rather than as a preposition; this part of the work was carried out on Italian only, since вокруг does not have the nature of an approximator. The paper then explored the different types of lexical combinations when the prepositional syntagma is headed by a verbal head, identifying co-occurrences divided by semantic fields and lexical solidarity, wich were stronger in Russian than in Italian. A series of examples from the parallel Italian-Russian subcorpus completes the study, supporting the hypotheses on the similarities and differences between вокругand intorno a. The work is divided into 5 sections: origin, first attestations and evolution of the two prepositions; spatial configuration; combinability of the two prepositions and quantitative data; comparative translations.The analysis was based on dictionary definitions, and examples taken from the Repubblica corpus, the National Corpus of the Russian Language and the parallel Italian-Russian sub-corpus