Stand-alone ADs. Sculptures

This chapter focuses on the linguistic specificities of professional stand-alone ADs for sculptures. The chapter emphasises the very limited presence of jargon despite the length of some words, especially adjectives and adverbs with a strong descriptive and evocative nature. In addition, it points to a varied lexical repertoire characterised by a wide array of terms referring to dimensions, materials, and body parts. Compared to the painting corpus, the more frequent use of passive voice constructions is explained as needing to emphasise sculpting techniques rather than sculptors—who are normally unknown or unspecified. Further, the tendency to prefer the copular verb be rather than use a larger array of verbs is explained as reporting descriptions in an unquestionable fashion, a trend that might relate to the reduced interpretative complexity of the sculptures under investigation.