Mind The Gap

by Peter Wilson

The book systematically analyses this inherent gappiness of language, technically known as ellipsis, and provides an account of the different contexts, both linguistic and situational, which affect its use. A wide variety of examples of spoken and written English, both literary and non-literary, is used to support a classification of elliptical language that ranges from the conversational fragment and the advertisement to the dialogue of Shakespeare and imagist poetry. The incidence of different types of ellipsis is shown to contribute to the distinctive style of such diverse texts as spoken sports commentary and modernist fiction.
Mind the Gap shows how ellipsis is a feature of major structural and stylistic importance to our understanding of spoken and written language, and will be of interest to undergraduate students of linguistics, literature, communication and the interrelations between them.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published May 16, 2000