Maurizio Gotti

Investigating Specialized Discourse is a shortened and revised textbook edition of the monograph Specialized Discourse (2003). This book analyses the various features of specialized discourse in order to assess its degree of specificity and diversification, as compared to general language. Prior to any analysis of such traits, the notion of specialized discourse and its distinctive properties are clarified. The presence of such properties is accounted for not only in linguistic but also in pragmatic terms since the approach is interpretative rather than merely descriptive. Indeed, the complexity of this discourse calls for a multidimensional analysis, covering both lexis and morpho-syntax as well as textual patterning. Some lexical aspects, morpho-syntactic features and textual genres are also examined from a diachronic perspective, thus showing how various conventions concerning specialized discourse have developed over the last centuries.

This volume presents the results of a research team of the University of Bergamo, whose aim was the analysis of verbal modality in the Helsinki corpus. This corpus includes a large selection of texts compiled in Middle English and Early Modern English and offers a good diatypic coverage, as it contains a wide range of text-types, genres and registers. Within a common methodological framework, individual chapters measure and analyze the occurrence and semantic values of central modal verbs, relating them to such parameters as text type, speech-relatedness and pragmatic function. This research project is part of a wider national project aiming to register and comment on the formal variety of modal manifestations and their relative frequency in a range of texts covering approximately four centuries, from about 1300 to 1700.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at an international conference held in Bergamo (5-6 May 2000), which focussed on the semantic and pragmatic values of modality in specialized texts - legal, economic, academic and medical. The assembled contributions give an overview of the range of scholarly approaches to modality. They convey the theoretical background and provide in-depth analyses of specialized texts on a synchronic as well as on a diachronic level.

The object of the volume is the analysis of the main dictionaries and glossaries of the canting language (the particular jargon spoken by thieves and vagabonds) that appeared in the 17th and 18th centuries. The scholars' attention has mostly concentrated on the earliest publications - particulary those appearing in the Elizabethan period -, while relatively little research has investigated subsequent canting dictionaries and glossaries. The aim of the present volume is to fill this gap. The main works on canting published in the 17th and 18th centuries are analysed in chapters 3 to 10. The first two chapters provide a necessary introduction to the investigation carried out in the subsequent sections, examining the great increase in the numbers of vagabonds and criminals in England in that period from a sociohistorical perspective and reviewing the 16th-century English literature about the underworld. The subsequent eight chapters give a detailed analysis of the main works on canting which appeared in the second part of the 17th century and during the whole of the 18th century. The specific features of each publication are identified, as well as the method adopted by its author in the compilation of his dictionary/glossary and the most likely sources of its entries, in order to determine the degree of novelty and relevance that his contribution has brought to this field. The final chapter deals with the evolution in the meaning of the term 'cant' itself in the period taken into consideration.