Abstract
The dissertation focuses on diachronic variation in a professional genre which has gained
growing importance over time in the field of museum public relations: exhibition press
announcements (EPAs). Keeping a middle ground between media and art discourse, EPAs are
written for journalists in charge of reviews, although, once they are published on museum websites,
they are also able to reach general audience.
For the purposes of this research a new corpus was compiled, the EPA Diacorpus, made up
of 300 thousand words (tokens) and comprising 378 EPAs dating from 1950 to 2009, half issued by
American and half by British museums.
The data processing consisted of different stages, from computer-based to manual analysis
of the texts. In order to become acquainted with the data and aware of the types of research
questions that could prove worthy of investigation, a preliminary analysis was carried out. In view
of the related findings, it was stipulated to concentrate the exploration of the EPA Diacorpus on two
main linguistic aspects: diachronic lexical variation and diachronic structural variation.
The lexical analysis allowed to report a number of lexical trends reflective of changes in the
way exhibitions are organized and artists are selected. A significant phenomenon is the shift from
one-item to multi-item exhibitions: the decline of the word picture in its singular form, rather than
in its plural, typically pre-modified by a determiner (the, this), in parallel to the increase of other
plural nouns identifying art works to put on display (images, works, objects) leads us to that
conclusion. Moreover, something has changed in the way artists are selected for exhibitions: they
do not have to be famous – another declining word –, nor great or known, since the latter adjectives
preferably refer to their work, but they definitely must have an acknowledged career, a noun
showing a clear pattern of growth across decades. Young artists, conversely, have fewer advantages
in the art scene, as reflected by the lexical choice of EPAs, where less than 30 occurrences can be
ascribed to the semantic field of youth. Art subjects may change, and portraits – an increasing item
– may be more intriguing for our times, but a landscape is still a must for any exhibition, as well as
drawings and paintings, to mention some lockwords of the corpus. The analysis also highlighted a
preference for more vivid descriptions, not filtered by distancing verbs: the decline of the forms
shown and shows can be interpreted in these terms.
Coming to the structure analysis, while contemporary EPAs show a more consistent scheme,
the one provided by earlier texts is varied. Yet a prototypical structure comprised of three main
moves may be already highlighted in the 1950s: a brief announcement of the exhibition, an
explanatory section on the topic, and some pieces of information specific for the press members,
soliciting their response, although in a very implicit way. Starting from the 1980s two promotional
moves have been highlighted: one establishing credentials for the exhibition by stating its credits,
such as organization, curatorship and sponsorship, and one providing technical information for
visitors (opening hours, free or charged admission, how to buy tickets, collateral events, etc...).