Introduction: English linguistics

This introduction gives an overview of the contributions to the volume relevant to the field of English linguistics, which address the theme of 'thinking out of the box' rom various perspectives – by choosing as research topics linguistic phenomena often regarded as marginal or irregular (Mattiello and Gesuato) or which exemplify reactive rather than initiating discourse (Meledandri); by looking into a range of potential conditioning environments (e.g. formal and semantic) to account for those phenomena (Mattiello); by exploring both the most frequent and the most typical instantiations of those phenomena (Mastrofini and Bagli); by adopting mixed methods of investigation (Mastrofini and Bagli; Meledandri) or drawing on multiple theoretical frameworks (Mastrofini and Bagli); and finally, by presenting studies at the intersection between English language research and other fields of investigation: UK legislation (Pennisi), multimodality in TV series (Arizzi), and British literature (Turci and Luporini). The examination of “niche” linguistic phenomena provides a deeper understanding of the workings of the grammatical system of English; complex linguistic phenomena benefit from triangulation of data, mixed-method approaches and cross-fertilization with other disciplines; linguistic patterns that manifest themselves at one grammatical level may have to be accounted for with reference to a combination of grammatical levels; and motivated hypotheses about English language use, grounded on previous findings, have to be tested against empirical data. The contributions show that some of the areas recently explored by these scholars are: linguistic phenomena (i.e. English creative morphology and phraseology); multimodality in movies (i.e. hand movements); local cultural phenomena (i.e. tourism in Sicily); British political issues (i.e. Brexit, UK legislation); and linguistic aspects of English literature (i.e. Naturalism).