Introduction [a: Communicating English in Specialised Domains. A Festschrift for Maurizio Gotti]

This volume is dedicated to Maurizio Gotti, in honour of his long and noteworthy academic career. Maurizio Gotti was the first student to graduate at the Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Bergamo, where he started his academic career. Here he served as Full Professor of History of the English Language and of English Language and Translation for more than two decades; he founded the internationally known research centre on specialized languages (CERLIS) and started the Linguistic Insights book series with the prestigious publishing house Peter Lang. In the course of his career he has also been assigned multiple and prestigious offices, at both national level and international level. Maurizio Gotti’s high academic profile has been reflected in his experience as a visiting professor in many universities around the world where he carried out research and teaching activities. Maurizio Gotti’s intellectual endeavours have encompassed many knowledge domains: He has made significant contributions to multiple areas of study including specialized discourses, lexicography, history of the English language and language teaching. His work has significantly contributed to extending and expanding existing research territories in both synchronic and diachronic domains, but has also, and distinctively, contributed to establishing and defining new areas of investigation, bringing together and harmonizing methodologies and applying them to a specific range of communicative events generally grouped under the label of specialized communication, which comprises academic, economic, legal, political, medical, and tourism discourses. This wide-ranging collection brings together essays from these various fields of enquiry authored by an international group of scholars whose academic input interacts in various ways with ideas and topics introduced or extensively discussed in Maurizio Gotti's studies. The chapters have been grouped in four theme-based sections representing the main threads in Maurizio Gotti’s research, from the macro area of specialised discourse to the more specific fields of research, namely academic and legal languages. The fourth section includes contributions dealing with the history of English language, and is followed by a miscellaneous section which concludes the collection.