Art generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently having great repercussion online. The reason for this is the fact that it allows people without creative talent to produce outstanding works by just typing in the description of what they want to illustrate. However, the appearance of this technology has also caused some discomfort among artists and graphic designers, who see their craft threatened by a service that is available to anyone free of charge. In this article, the capability of some of these platforms to process figurative language will be assessed with the help of five well-known proverbs found in almost identical terms across a number of Western languages. These proverbs were used as the prompts on five of the most popular AI art generators accessible at present. After analyzing the results, our experiment concludes that AI evidences significant deficiencies in the processing of proverbs and, therefore, of figurative language. Consequently, AI does not seem able to substitute human agency completely in artistic creation yet. This exposes an aspect that needs improvement not just for the creative applications of AI but for other applications that it may have in the future. To achieve this, disciplines such as psycholinguistics should be integrated into the teams that develop AI.
This article analyses the use of proverbs in the American version of the sitcom The Office, especially in relation to Michael Scott, the show’s main protagonist. The purpose of the study is to explore the possibilities of proverbs as a comedic device and the use that scriptwriters make of paremiology for the portrayal of fictional characters. The case of Michael Scott is paradigmatic for these two approaches because, apart from being the protagonist of one of the most influential comedies in the last two decades, he exemplifies a creative use of paremiology through which he often modifies existing proverbs or invents proverb-like statements to support his ideas, rather than reciting proverbs in their canonical wording. As can be inferred, the intention of these paremiological practices is to make the audience laugh. From this analysis, we can draw the conclusion that scriptwriters deliberately include non-canonical proverbs in Michael’s speech for the humorous possibilities that they offer. Consequently, this procedure determines Michael’s characterisation in a way that relates to the traditional incongruity theory of humour. Finally, this paper intends to contribute to the establishment of a trend in current proverb scholarship that studies paremias for their comedic uses in modern media and to the dismissal of the widespread idea that they are not relevant in today’s society.
The present article analyzes the use of proverbs in The Inheritance Games (2020), the first book of the novel trilogy of the same name, currently enjoying great popularity and commercial success among young readers. In the first half of the book, proverbs are a central theme in the development of the action, continuing to be used frequently by various characters throughout the rest of the book, especially by Avery Grambs, the protagonist and first-person narrator. This use of proverbs in a novel targeted at young adults is remarkable inasmuch as they are a discourse device most commonly associated with older generations and traditions. Furthermore, proverbs contribute to the portrayal of various characters, illustrating their paremiological competence and the different ways in which they may be employed as established by proverb scholarship. As a result, the relevance of proverbs for the plot and their frequency of appearance challenges the widespread belief that they are old-fashioned uses of languages most frequently employed by older adults, potentially promoting an interest in them among teenagers and young adults reading the series.
The use of visual phraseological units in graphic literature is a common occurrence that has not received much attention from the scholarly community, having nonetheless been analysed in advertising and journalism. This lack of interest has been caused, at least partially, by the low esteem that academia has for this genre, which has undergone great development over the last few decades, growing both in complexity and in popularity among the reading public. Furthermore, this type of literature provides unmatched creative opportunities for authors and artists to explore different resources for multimodal communication, which also impacts the labour of translators and how the work, either in its original version or as a translation, is understood by readers. This article explores the use of visual phraseologisms in the series of children’s graphic novels Dog Man to determine how visual phraseological units are used in the various volumes and to analyse how this practice affects the translation of a genre, including the added difficulty for translators of having to preserve the connection between text and picture as intended by the author.
The purpose of this paper is to reassess the use of proverbs in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, taking as a starting point the article previously published by G. B. Bryan on this same topic in Proverbium in 1996. In it, Bryan came to the conclusion that proverbs did not abound in the series. For this reason, the collection of stories and the four novels published have been surveyed for their use of paremias in order to establish their frequency of appearance and how they are used by the author. Once a rather extensive catalog of sentences susceptible to being considered as proverbs had been gathered, they were individually checked against dictionaries to establish whether they could be labeled as such. After a detailed examination of the materials obtained, this paper contradicts the thesis presented by Bryan and demonstrates that Conan Doyle uses proverbs in his detective stories quite often, most frequently through the character of Holmes.
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