Semiotic and perspectival complexities arise together. Furthermore, to quote or re-present an artwork in words is to frame one global act of communication within another. So, in ekphrasis, the quoting chain goes from literary author to narrator to plastic artist, with their respective ends, skills, vehicles, audiences, and at times with further mediators en route. In such light, readers infer that the monologist has similarly murdered his wife once we catch and decode the underlying intertextual cum intermedia allusion. Our linguistic competence urges us to reach the final referents as fast as possible.
Poetic language draws attention to itself, that is, to the hierarchy of signifiers.
Whereas rhyme, meter, and alliteration impose additional patterning on the phonological signifiers, picture poems, acrostics, and some other manneristic devices impose additional patterning upon the graphemic signifiers. When alliterations are turned into puns, they become manneristic patterning of the phonological signifier. It is argued, by analogy with synesthesia, that stable characteristic visual shapes obstruct smooth perceptual fusion, and, on the basis of speech perception, that speech sounds are special in our cognitive economy, and visual patterning cannot achieve the naturalness of their patterning. That is why visual patterning is not admitted in nonmanneristic styles. Cognitive poetics suggests that in the response to poetry, adaptive devices are turned to an aesthetic end.