Art discourse revisited: Linguocultural specifics of childhood-related art tokens

The paper explores the linguistic representation of concepts behind the titles of paintings produced by British and American artists depicting childhood-related scenes and characters. Sociolinguistic and linguocultural factors of titling are analysed along with the pragmatic and cognitive effect of art tokens used by British and American artists. The study singles out seven conceptual segments incorporating a number of nuclear and peripheral art tokens, which are in turn represented by concept-specific lexical units referring to the theme of childhood. Quantitative and semantic analyses of research data are implemented to suggest reasons for the uneven distribution of conceptual segments in terms of their representation in painting titles.

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