Gabriel Greenberg
University of California, Los Angeles.
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Reference and Predication in Pictorial Representation
Wednesday, 19 February 2014
16:30-18:30 at Senate House Room 102
What kind of content do pictorial images express? Linguistic content arises, in the simplest case, when a sentence expresses the predication of a property to a referent. I begin by defending the familiar view that pictorial content also involves reference and predication in an analogous way. Thus a given picture might depict Obama (referent) as lifting his arm (predicate). Unfortunately, the format of pictorial representations resists any neat structural division into subject and predicate. How then is predicative pictorial content possible?
