(Non-)Äquivalenz und falsche Freundschaft von Kinegrammen im Sprachenpaar Deutsch-Italienisch

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 ver¬balisation 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 communi¬cation. Throughout the identified equivalence types, false friends appear as a transversal phe¬nomenon, 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.