The theoretically-oriented contributions share the assumption that languages are complex dynamic systems whithin which different types of structures act as organizers in order to make it possible for cognition to handle the immense amount of information involved in the communicative process. Whithin this view, in which words act at the same time as cues of mental representations, triggers of ad hoc conceptual constructions, and anchors which prevent meanings from verging on the border of chaos, it is claimed that lexical complexity is a function of the parameters which differently organize the conceptual material in the task at stake.
Translation has been selected as a privileged vantage point for empirical observation of the dynamics of meaning construal. Indeed, translation is a powerful heuristic tool in the investigation of lexical complexity, since it brings to the fore not only the non-linear mapping between words and concepts in different text types, and the complex mapping between words belonging to different lexical systems, but also and above all the complex interplay between functions and meanings under the constrains imposed by culture-specificity to text recontextualization. Under this respect, literary translation is especially suggestive of the power of words to dynamically recreate meanings and, at the same time, of the limits imposed by text-internal and external conventions. Papers in this section highlight the istersemiotic complexities reaised by the translation of dramatic as well as narrative texts.
Biografia degli autori
Marcella Bertuccelli Papi
Gloria Cappelli
Silvia Masi
Silvia Masi is a researcher in English Linguistics at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature of the University of Pisa, Italy, where she received a Ph.D. in Linguistics of Modern Languages in 2004. Her research interests are in the fields of lexical semantics, pragmatics, text linguistics and translation.She has co-edited ( together with Marcella Bertuccelli Papi and Gloria Cappelli) Lexical Complexity: Theoretical Assessment and Translational Perspectives (2007) and published several articles in national and international journals anad collections.
