Stand-alone AD. Paintings

This chapter focuses on the linguistic specificities of professional stand-alone painting ADs. From a corpus of 55 AD scripts, it investigates the descriptive nature of these highly informative texts which strongly rely on a wide array of copular and pseudo-copular verbs, favour active voice constructions emphasising the painters’ agentive role, and exploit modal auxiliaries to engage visitors and offer them wide interpretative options. Through an illustration of the typifying words and patterns used, the chapter shows the primacy of literary rather than jargonised language in the scripts. A repertoire of chromonyms and their morpho-syntactic structure is discussed in detail and reflects the importance of colour adjectives in this specific AD genre.