Generalized Nominations in Painted Tiled Inscriptions of the 18th Century

The paper considers Russian smooth painted tiles of the 18th century. Artisans usually used drawing templates and text cliches, that they combined with a suitable picture. About one-third of the entire corpus of tile texts consists of nominative inscriptions, which named and briefly explained the image. Artisans selected each inscription in accordance with the so-called visual marker — the element of the image (gesture, pose, attribute) that seemed most important at a particular moment. The most illustrative group of such inscriptions includes syntactically similar texts with a keyword, that could become a stable nomination for a visual marker. The keyword (usually an abstract noun) was at the beginning of sentences, followed by a predicate and a pronoun, which indicated the number of characters on the tile. This and some other syntactic sequences have formed text cliches. Similar constructions are found outside of inscriptions on the tile. Some of them are related to the literary style: they could imitate the poetic language (created at the same time, in the 18th century) and translated mottos. Some generalized nominations, that are similar or identical to keywords on tiles inscriptions, are found in the Russian folklore of this time. Thanks to the use of abstract nouns and hypernyms, the text sounded like an aphorism, a banal genre scene became an illustration of universal human experience. However, the artisans, who painted the tiles, understood the keyword mainly as the name of specific objects and details of the image.