THE LANGUAGE OF ART BLOGS

This study analyses the language of “art blogs”, i.e. blogs dealing with art, through a specialised corpus of fifty-four blogs published during 2013. Both posts and comments are included in the present investigation into the linguistic character of art blogs. The methodological choices reflect the need for a multifaceted analysis which covers different aspects, from text typology to linguistic creativity and popularisation. A review of the relevant literature on blogs brings to light the need for a specific characterisation of art blogs, since they tend to have a blended style, which cannot be ascribed to the traditional categories of personal and thematic blogging. The distinctive features of posts and comments are then investigated through a multidimensional analysis which reveals that posts and comments are two different text types. Successively, the corpus is compared to a specialised corpus of art announcements, within the field of popularised and specialised discourse. Finally, several examples of linguistic creativity are explored and presented, thus showing that traditional descriptive paradigms are unsuited to analyse the outcomes of art bloggers.

In questo studio si analizza il linguaggio utilizzato nei blog che si occupano di storia dell'arte, genere diffuso online, tramite un corpus di 54 blogs pubblicati nel 2013. Nell'ambito della linguistica dei corpora, l'analisi permette di ridefinire le tradizionali categorie utilizzate per descrivere i blog, fornisce una descrizione tipologica dei post e dei commenti tramite l'utilizzo di un apposito software, oltre a descrivere il livello di specializzazione del linguaggio. Vengono infine riportati esempi di creatività linguistica in questo genere digitale.