Graeme Forbes Depiction Verbs and the Definiteness Effect

Depiction Verbs and the Definiteness E ff ect  Introduction This paper is part of a longer project on the semantics of depiction verbs and their associated relational nouns. Depiction verbs include verbs for physical acts, such as ' draw' (with relational noun ' drawing'), 'sketch', 'caricature', 'sculpt', 'write (about)', and verbs for mental ones, such as 'visualize', 'imagine', and 'fantasize'. They are a type of intensional transitive verb (), and the primary problem they raise is shared with other  's, namely, how to give a compositional semantic account of the relational/notional ambiguity in the verb phrases they form with quantified noun phrases ₍ 's ₎ as complements. For instance, though 'Guercino drew a dog' can be understood relationally to mean that there is a particular dog he drew, there is an alternative notional reading according to which he drew a dog but maybe not any particular dog. The logical form of this reading is obscure. However, there is also a problem about depiction-verb semantics that is not shared with other  's: a depiction-verb phrase has a notional reading only if its noun phrase is either a bare plural or has a determiner from a restricted group.