• schizofrenia
• linguaggio figurato
• figurative language
• schizophrenia

The thesis aims at analyzing the linguistic productions of patients affected by schizophrenia, in search of expressions of figurative language and Peculiar Word Choices, which are known from psychopathological literature to be characteristic features of schizophrenic speech. Two corpora from two different studies on schizophrenia gave the material for the linguistic analysis.
The expected results were to find occurrences of expressions of figurative language, and to find occurrences of word approximations, neologisms, rare words and paraphasia, that are included in the macrocategory of Peculiar Word Choices and are characteristics of the language of people affected by schizophrenia.
The results obtained underlined some interesting facts. In the first corpus, which included the transcriptions of two different tasks in which the pragmatic abilities of the patients had been tested, a large difference between the number of occurrences of figurative expressions was recorded between the interview task and between the figurative language explanation task. This showed that different tasks determine a different use of figurative language in people with schizophrenia. Occurrences of Peculiar Word choices have been found especially in the Interview task, in which patients were allowed to talk freely.
Furthermore, correlations have been made between these results and the scores of the patients in the behavioral tests evaluating their abilities in pragmatic production and comprehension, IQ, cognitive dimension, ToM, psychopathology, quality of life and demographic features. Correlations underlined associations between Peculiar Word Choices and free speech, and more generally between the analyzed linguistic uses and the symptoms.
The analysis of the second corpus confirmed only the quantitative data of the first one, but given that this corpus only contained samples of free speech of the patients, it has not been possible to find further associations.