Review of Lennon, Paul (2004) Allusions In The Press. An Applied Linguistic Study

The study reported in this book is concerned with “echoic” allusions in British national daily newspapers. Echoic allusions, such as “Gone with a very big wind”, “Here, many hands for once make heavy work” or “Bill shoots from the lip” remind the reader of a piece of language from another remembered context, e.g. the title of a novel (Gone with the wind), a proverb (Many hands make light work), an idiom (To shoot from the hip), etc. The aim of the study is to describe the occurrences of allusions in the corpus, to model the process by which the reader recognizes and understands them, and to deal with their function.