Graeme Forbes. Depiction Verbs and the Definiteness Effect (Draft 1, June 2003)

This paper is about a puzzling aspect of the behavior of depiction verbs (‘sketch’, ‘draw’, ‘sculpt’, ‘imagine’ etc.). Most groups of intensional transitive verbs form verb phrases with quantified noun phrases in a way that permits a notional reading of the verb phrase, regardless of the quantificational determiner in the noun phrase. For example, “Perseus seeks exactly one gorgon”, “Perseus seeks another gorgon”, and “Perseus seeks every gorgon” can all be understood notionally (the coda “but no particular gorgon (s)” makes sense in each case). But if we change “seeks” to “drew”, the notional reading with “every gorgon” disappears. Similarly with “most”, “the” and “both”. I offer an account of why this happens in terms of Keenan’s classification of determiners vis à vis the definiteness effect.

This short paper (3060 words exc. notes and bibliography) is excerpted from “Depiction Verbs: The Languages of Art Semantics” (see below).

Depiction Verbs: The Languages of Art Semantics (Draft 4, June 2003)

This paper is a “reading” version of “Verbs of Creation and Depiction” (see below for abstract) prepared for the Society for Exact Philosophy and Logica 2003. Detailed discussion of the semantics of the progressive and some of the longer footnotes have been excised. Draft 4 contains substantial changes in the discussion of negative determiners and of the definiteness effect.