Le espressioni della casualità tra universale e particolare. considerazioni sull’italiano toccare in sorte a

This paper aims to investigate the Italian construction toccare in sorte a, which roughly means ‘to befall (someone)’. The research will try to identify the metaphorical extensions and the other semantic processes underlying the specific meaning of the verb toccare, the prepositional phrase in sorte (sorte roughly meaning ‘chance’), and the construction as a whole, following the Conceptual Metaphor theory (cf. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1993; Kövecses, 2005). More specifically, this construction consists of (a) something that tocca in sorte (the syntactic subject of toccare), (b) a human being encoded with the dative of a pronoun or with the prepositional phrase “a ‘to’ + a noun”, (c) the prepositional phrase in sorte.