Open Access"Painting cows" from a type-logical perspective
Author(s) -
Sebastian Bücking
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
zas papers in linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1435-9588
DOI - 10.21248/zaspil.60.2018.467
Subject(s) - depiction , representation (politics) , reading (process) , noun , linguistics , computer science , type (biology) , perspective (graphical) , object (grammar) , painting , key (lock) , ambiguity , artificial intelligence , epistemology , philosophy , art , art history , ecology , politics , political science , law , biology , computer security
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.