Silent abstractions versus “Look at me” drawings

Corpus evidence that artworks’ subject matter affects their fictive speech

Karen Sullivan | University of Queensland, Australia

Artworks can be said to metaphorically “speak” to their viewers (Sullivan 2006, 2009) in a form of fictive interaction (Pascual 2002). The current study examines the fictive speech of different types of artworks in a corpus of 1,105 examples extracted from DeviantART, the world’s largest online artwork community. In the corpus, abstract artworks are less often presented as “speaking” directly than figurative artworks. That is, a figurative painting might say, “Look at me!” in directly presented speech, whereas an abstract work is more likely to scream for attention without any direct speech attributed to the artwork. I suggest three reasons for this disparity. I also find that artworks depicting named characters participate in fictive conversations not shared by other works.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, fictive interaction, indirect speech, metaphor, visual art

Published online: 01 November 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.55.05sul

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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

No author info given

2014. In Fictive Interaction [Human Cognitive Processing, 47],

Pascual, Esther & Emilia Królak

2018. The ‘listen to characters thinking’ novel. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 16:2 ► pp. 399 ff.

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