Ricerc@Sapienza

This paper examines polysemy of Russian idioms in relation to cross=linguistic equivalence. By carrying out the
contrastive analysis of some Russian polysemic idioms and their Italian equivalents, it is shown that the same conceptual
metaphor can be realized differently in different languages, giving rise to the phenomenon of asymmetrical polysemy.

The author’s thesis is that both language-teaching methods and vocabulary trainers have so far neglected or underestimated the phenomenon of polysemy, which is typical of high-frequency lexical units. In order to test this hypothesis, the study looks at the Pons 2014 vocabulary trainer „250 Wortschatz-Übungen Deutsch als Fremdsprache“ and examines its entries on the high-frequency verbs ziehen, kommen and gehen. The results suggest that the point at issue deserves further elaboration not merely on the didactical but also on the theoretical-lexicographical level.