Cosa è lo spazio? Un aperçu lessicografico

The paper examines the definitions of 'space' in the major Italian and English monolingual dictionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the aim of using lexicography as a window onto the history of the conceptualization and categorization of the idea of space from a diachronic and cross-linguistic perspective. The analysis has shown that no core definition of 'space' is shared by the two languages: while in Italian the senses related to two-dimensional space predominate, in English the volumetric meaning is prevalent. Differences are also found in the diachronic reception of the various senses and in the colexifications, among which particularly noteworthy are those pointing to the conceptual metaphor of the MIND AS A CONTAINER.