Ontological Structure and Digital Corpora for Metaphorical Sense Recognition

Based on the EuroWordNet/ItalWordNet model, a terminological database which contains terms belonging to the specialized lexicon of the maritime navigation and transport domain was created. Our lexicographic research aims to give prominence to the frequency of idiomatic expressions and metaphors used in everyday language that come from this cultural environment. This paper deals with a) idiomatic expressions and metaphors of the maritime domain which is considered as "source" domain, b) the use and the frequency of this type of idiomatic expressions and metaphors in a large corpus of Italian contemporary language, c) the semantic codification of metaphors and idiomatic expressions in the terminological database, d) the way the ontological structure of the database can help in metaphorical sense recognition.