Abstract

Giuseppe Mosconi first published On metaphor in 1984. In these years, metaphor comprehension becomes a relevant topic especially in the international psychological panorama. Mosconi’s interest in metaphor was not accidental as it arose from his conception of the relationship between language and thought, and in particular from the idea that «we do not think in words, but in discourse». The theoretical relevance of Mosconi’s approach to metaphor, well highlighted in this essay, is that, in a completely autonomous way and perhaps only apparently unrelated to the international psycholinguistic literature, it converges in outlining a paradigm shift from seeing the metaphor as a form of implicit comparison which essentially calls into question the properties predicated by single words to conceive metaphor as a complex conceptual structure with relevant discursive and pragmatic effects.