Russian "mushroom" metaphor and its equivalent translation into Italian

This article considers the issues related to the lexical lacunarity and to the difficulties in adequate translation of Russian phytonyms. This research revolves around the concept "lacuna" of G.V. Bykova, N.I. Konrad, Yu.A. Sorokin, I.Yu. Markovina, etc., which is based on the connection between language and culture. The subject of this study are metaphors formed by the denominations of mushrooms in the Russian and Italian languages. Particularly, this paper focuses on the phytonyms smorcok (morel), mukhomor (fly agaric), poganka (toadstool) and staryy grib (old mushroom) which develop figurative meanings with negative semantics. The particular interest of the work lies in the choice of the thematic group which has rarely been an object of study itself. The aim of this paper is to investigate the trends in the process of metaphorization of this thematic group, to detect lexical lacunae concerning phytometaphors in the dictionaries, to analyze the types of lacunae and to clarify why such lacunae exist and how to eliminate them. For the research different types of Russian and Italian dictionaries, as well as texts from the Russian National Corpus (RNC) and the results of psycholinguistic experiments, were used. Investigating the given thematic group, we have found out a big difference between the two languages: in Russian mushroom denominations develop metaphorical meanings, while in Italian they do not even bring up figurative association. We have analyzed the variation of the metaphorical semantics of these denominations as registered in dictionaries and realized in texts (RNC) in order to understand how to convey the meaning of the Russian metaphor as fully as possible when there is no Italian equivalent. As a result, we have brought to light that commonly the figurative meaning of the analyzed words has a negative connotation (unpleasant, bad, detestable etc.) and the semantic feature old age is often a "camouflage" in phytometaphors, hiding the speaker's intentions to interpret negatively any other unpleasant traits of a given person. In the work the possible means to eliminate the lexical lacuna in question are examined. The search for equivalents is realized on the basis of lexicographic sources and original and translated texts. In conclusion, an interlingual lexical lacuna was identified: in the process of metaphorization the theme "mushrooms", relevant as it is in the Russian language, is clearly absent in Italian. This lexical lacuna is more or less successfully covered in Italian thanks to other means, lexical (using descriptive periphrases or synonyms) or morphological (word-formal derivatives with emotional-evaluation formants).

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