Ad hoc categories in the ekphrastic space of John Berger's essays about painting: A cognitive linguistic analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to reveal the linguocognitive characteristics of the ad hoc categories in the ekphrastic space of Berger's essays. The methods applied in the research are conceptual semantic and contextual interpretative analyses as well as analysis in terms of conceptual metaphors. The material of the study is Berger's essays about 20th-century painters. Ultimately, this study determines that ad hoc category construction in the ekphrastic space of Berger's essays is always connected with generalising ekphrasis comprising a whole body of a painter's work rather than simple ekphrasis directed towards one picture. Also descriptive ekphrasis is important for the creation of the ad hoc categories, and interpretative ekphrasis bears a crucial role in this process. The property that establishes the identity of an ad hoc category is always given an explicit verbal representation. When the identifying property is used to characterise the painter whose work is the prime focus in the essay, this property is unambiguously presented in semantically rich verbal contexts larger than one sentence, but when the ad hoc category identifying property is used to represent an artist who only receives a cursory mention, this property is given very briefly. The implicit members of the ad hoc categories tend to remain implicit, thus highlighting the achievements of the painter under discussion. According to this study, there are three subtypes of the ad hoc categories in the ekphrastic space of Berger's essays: a completely novel one, a category that is developed through reconsideration of a well-established category, and a category in doubt. The existence of such subtypes signifies that human categorisation is a flexible process with natural categories and completely novel categories at the extremes of a range of categorical possibilities.