The article considers contrastive linguistics as a discipline that interacts closely with its intralinguistic and applied neighbouring disciplines. Within this framework, the online ontology IMAGACT presents an instrument that allows to contrast how languages lexicalize concrete actions movements, modification of objects, setting relations among objects, etc.) in their verbs.
German and Italian, the language pair considered here, differ typologically in their lexicalization strategies, which leads to difficulties in L2 acquisition, translation and lexicography. The article shows how the corpus-based IMAGACT database, which presents a set of 1010 actions
in short films and links them to the appropriate verbs in 15 languages, provides help in these fields, and how it can at the same time empirically support contrastive-typological findings.
