Note sul modello cognitivo applicato alla lingua nahuatl

The following analysis focuses on some cognitive studies which aim is to explore those mental processes of semantic association involved in the meaning construction of difrasismos. A glimpse on Ronald Langacker’s cognitive Grammar represents the starting point to look atthe Grammar of a language no longer as symbolic phenomena, but rather as a cognitive process, in which the meaning assumes a conceptual dimension. In this new dimension, conceptualization plays an essential role for the interpretation of some creative processes, such as metaphor and metonym. The turning point for the introduction of these two processes in a cognitive context is marked by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work, Metaphors we live by. My study explores how these two trajectories work in the creation of what Montes de Oca has called conceptual nucleus, regarding the type of classification of the most common nahuatl structure. Similarly, Gilles Fauconnier’s mental spaces can be used for mapping an integration network which comes up from an input space, containing the elements which refer to a difrastic construction. In this blended space, structure known as difrasismo arises.