(Non-)Equivalence and false Friends of Kinegrams in the German-Italian Language Pair

The focus of the present contrastive analysis concerns the fuzzy problem of (non)-equivalence of kinegrams, a special class of idiomatic expressions in which the literal and the phraseological meaning coexist metonymically side by side. In fact, they denote a non-verbal physical behaviour, which is itself symbolically encoded and so culture-specific. Even though the comparison of kinegrams in German and Italian shows similarities in the verbalisation of facial expressions, gestures and postures, in most cases they are only partial as well as non-equivalents, which can occasionally lead to misunderstandings in intercultural communication. Throughout the identified equivalence types, false friends appear as a transversal phenomenon, whereby the total false friends with a similar form and completely different meaning are to be distinguished from the partial false friends with an almost identical image component and very similar, but not identical lexicalised meanings.