Veronica Bonsignori

The volume collects articles which discuss complexity, conventionality and creativity in the English language from perspectives as diverse as specialised discourse, language teaching and learning, language varieties, lexical creativity, stylistics, knowledge dissemination through the media and audio-visual translation. It offers a multifaceted picture of the ways in which opposing forces exerted by conventionality and creativity contribute to shaping all levels of the linguistic system. The interpretive paradigm is offered by the theory of complex systems, a rich research framework attempting to describe and explain the dynamics which emerge in the many forms of situational adaptation of natural systems. Norms and conventions are, in fact, constantly exploited and manipulated through the creative behaviour of language users. This may lead to unpredictable synchronic effects and variation and, ultimately, to diachronic innovation.

Ellipsis is a form of syntactic reduction that is pervasive in both written and oral communication. It has been widely studied from different perspectives, and therefore its definition has always been quite problematic. The present work attempts to define this phenomenon in the English language. An account of the different types of ellipsis is provided, by drawing a classification with examples for each category, and three main approaches for its interpretation are outlined, i.e., text linguistics, psycholinguistics, and pragmatics. The final chapter investigates the use of the different types of ellipsis in English written and spoken texts, e.g., novels, film scripts, research articles, excerpts from diaries, recipes, newspaper headlines, advertisements, transcriptions of face-to-face conversation, etc., within the frame of textual linguistics, in order to shed some light on the different functions it may perform across genres and text types.