"Painting cows" from a type-logical perspective

Abstract

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 of
a specific cow. This paper takes issue with a property-based intensional analysis of depiction
verbs (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 cow
as such, whereas the p-reading is rooted in the interpolation of an implicit representation via
coercion. This take on the ambiguity captures the following key traits. On i-readings, only representations
are accessible to quantifiers and anaphors; moreover, intensional effects such as
substitution failure disappear once ordinary objects and representations are adequately distinguished.
P-readings, by contrast, involve representations that depend on the portrayed ordinary
objects as particulars; correspondingly, only ordinary objects are accessible to quantifiers and
anaphors. The proposal is spelled out in Asher’s (2011) Type Composition Logic.
Keywords: depiction verbs, visual representations, intensional transitives, coercion, Type
Composition Logic.