Mind The Gaps

Mind the Gap

We rarely speak or even write in the complete sentences that are often held to be the ideal form of linguistic communication. Language is, in fact, full of gaps, because speakers and writers operate in contexts which allow bits of language to be understood rather than expressed. This book systematically analyses this inherent gappiness of language, known as ellipsis, and provides an account of the different contexts, both linguistic and situational, which affect its use. Peter Wilson draws on a wide variety of examples of spoken and written English, and both literary and non-literary to present a comprehensive classification of elliptical language that ranges from the conversational fragment and the advertisement to the dialogue of Shakespeare and imagist poetry. 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..

Mind the Gap

Abstract begins: This dissertation argues that the gap, which according to narrative theory is a characteristic of all fictional narrative, in comics works at all levels of signification. Gaps or absences signify in the drawn image, the page layout, the sequence, and image-text combinations, as well as in the narrative. Comics rely on the minimizing and absence of information, rather than representation in detail. The notion of the gap as an inherent part of the abstraction that is typical of the comics image is established. ...

Poems