DPs and CPs in Depiction Complements

Abstract

We present a compositional semantics for DP/CP-neutral depiction verbs (e.g. paint, imagine, visualize, write (about)) that interprets the DP and CP complements of these verbs in the same semantic type, ⟨s,t⟩ (i.e. as partial sets of situations). Our semantics answers several challenges for semantics for depiction reports (e.g.[29,32,33])– in particular, the difficulty of interpreting declarative and coordinated DP/CP complements of these reports, of explaining the selectional restrictions (qua different kinds of CPs) of many depiction verbs, and of accounting for entailment relations between DP- and CP-complemented depiction reports. At the same time, it preserves the merits of existing semantics for depiction verbs.