Semantics Research Group Meeting, November 15, 2019

(Joint work with Markus Werning, Ruhr University Bochum.)

In this talk, I show that single-type semantics (see Liefke and Werning, 2018) provides a compositional semantics for physical and mental depiction reports (e.g. ‘Paul is painting a penguin’, ‘Uli is imagining a unicorn’) that improves upon Montague-style semantics (see Moltmann, 1997) and property-based semantics for such reports (see Zimmermann, 2016; cf. Zimmermann, 1993). In particular, single-type semantics accounts for missing readings of depiction reports with a strong quantificational object DP and blocks unwarranted inferences to a common objective. The semantics also makes a number of plausible predictions about the role of context in the interpretation of depiction complements.