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 other publications

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

Pascual, Esther & Emilia Królak

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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 october 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.