Semantics etc.

“Graeme Forbes”:http://www.tulane.edu/~forbes/. Verbs of Creation and Depiction: More Events in the Semantics of English (Draft 6, July 2003)

bq. This paper is descended from one written for a symposium on the work of Terence Parsons (Notre Dame University, 7th to 8th February 2003). Creation verbs (’build’, ‘construct’, ‘assemble’ etc.) and depiction verbs (’sketch’, ‘draw’, ’sculpt’, ‘imagine’ etc.) have certain affinities, and my solution to the unfinished-object problem for creation verbs in the progressive deploys a treatment of intensional transitives I have proposed elsewhere. This turns out to have consequences (hitherto unnoticed, at least by me) for the semantics of notional readings of depiction-verb phrases. The paper ends with a theory about why depiction verbs betray a definiteness effect in DP syntactic complements (”Verrocchio painted two/many/no angels” have notional readings, “Verrocchio painted the two/most/all angels” don’t).
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 gorgons”, “the gorgon” and “both gorgons”. 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 an earlier draft of “Verbs of Creation and Depiction”.
A future version of this paper should appear in Facta Philosophica in 2003. This draft addresses some problems about intensional transitives raised by Moltmann and Zimmerman, and corrects some mistakes in my paper in The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (S.V. for 2002). Like that paper, its main concern is with the conjunctive force of disjunctive NP complements of intensional transitive verbs: “Smith needs a good lawyer or a friendly judge” on its normal reading implies both “a good lawyer could help him” AND “a friendly judge could help him”. The reading on which “Smith needs a good lawyer or a friendly judge” is implied by “Smith needs a good lawyer” alone is much less preferred.

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