"Painting cows" from a type-logical perspective

Depiction verbs such as paint license i(mage)- and p(ortrait)-readings; for instance,Ben painted a cow can convey that Ben produced an image of an unspecific cow or a portrait ofa specific cow. This paper takes issue with a property-based intensional analysis of depictionverbs (Zimmermann, 2006b, 2016) and instead argues for an extensional account. Accordingly,the i-reading is rooted in the introduction of worldly representations by the explicit noun cowas such, whereas the p-reading is rooted in the interpolation of an implicit representation viacoercion. This take on the ambiguity captures the following key traits. On i-readings, only representationsare accessible to quantifiers and anaphors; moreover, intensional effects such assubstitution failure disappear once ordinary objects and representations are adequately distinguished.P-readings, by contrast, involve representations that depend on the portrayed ordinaryobjects as particulars; correspondingly, only ordinary objects are accessible to quantifiers andanaphors. The proposal is spelled out in Asher’s (2011) Type Composition Logic.Keywords: depiction verbs, visual representations, intensional transitives, coercion, TypeComposition Logic

Ambiguity · Art · Art history · Depiction · Epistemology · Linguistics · Noun · Painting · Computer Science · linguistics and terminology studies · Philosophy · Artificial Intelligence

• Semantics in Generative Grammar

  Brogan Geurts, Bart Geurts et al.•Language•1999

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