Kristina Liefke (Frankfurt)

DPs and CPs in Depiction Complements


I present a compositional semantics for DP/CP-neutral depiction verbs (e.g. 'paint', 'imagine') that interprets the DP and CP complements of these verbs in the same semantic type, (i.e. as partial sets of situations). This semantics answers several challenges for the semantics of depiction reports -- 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 capturing entailment relations between clausal and nominal depiction reports.