Revisiting Shakespeare's Language

The complexity if Shakespeare's language has been an object of study for many scholars over the centuries, and is currently witnessing increased engagement fromlinguists with different scientific persuasions, who integrate knowledge and new research methods, and open up novel specialized subfields in Shakespearean linguistics. Taking inspiration from the recent trends in reserach, this special issue charts innovative research questions, perspectives and tools that are being empoyed to investigate Shakespeare's language across a wide range of his works - tragedies, comedies and sonnets. In doing so, it offers a prismatic picture of the Bard's wit. More specificaly, the collection of articles probes into teh advantages and strengths of adopting a linguistic approach to revisit Shakespeare's creativity and sets new avenues for future research, by capturing a righ diversity of perspectives and variously combining current developments in both linguistic theories and research methodologies: fromspeech act theory and cognitive poetics, fromtranslation studies to corpus linguistics, corpus-assisted research and computational analysis. Introduction: Annalisa Baicchi, Roberta Facchinetti, Silvia Cacchiani and Antonio Bertacca: Shakespeare’s language revisited in the 21st century: An introduction. Articles: Jonathan Culpeper, Alison Findlay, Beth Cortese and Mike Thelwall: Measuring emotional temperatures in Shakespeare’s drama. Roberta Mullini: Talking in asides in Shakespeare’s plays. Ulrich Busse: Lear’s questions revisited. Marina Bondi and Annalisa Sezzi‘: Come what come may, Time, and the Houre, runs through the roughest Day’: Temporal phraseology and the conceptual space of futurity in Macbeth. Francisco Gonzálvez-García: Taming iconicity in the Spanish and Italian translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Some observations from a (Contrastive) (Cognitive) Construction Grammar perspective. Svitlana Shurma and Wei-lun Lu: The cognitive potential of antithesis: ‘To be, or not to be’ in Hamlet’s signature soliloquy.