TY - JOUR
T1 - On not-at-issueness in pictures
AU - Esipova, Maria
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - In this paper, I make novel empirical observations about not-at-issue content in pictures, focusing on prohibition signs, and discuss the implications of these observations for our understanding of how meaning works in linguistic and non-linguistic systems. In particular, I show that for certain pieces of pictorial content, the at-issue vs. not-at-issue distinction is highly pragmatic, in a way that strongly resembles the restricting vs. non-restricting distinction in natural language modifiers. I, furthermore, demonstrate that such pieces of pictorial content also behave like modifiers for the purposes of ellipsis/anaphora resolution and alternative generation under only. Thus, I argue that the at-issue vs. not-at-issue distinction in these cases should, in fact, be analyzed in terms of restricting vs. non-restricting modification, rather than presuppositions contributed sublexically. These findings point to substantial parallels between pictures and natural language with respect to both pragmatic reasoning and compositional structuring of meaning.
AB - In this paper, I make novel empirical observations about not-at-issue content in pictures, focusing on prohibition signs, and discuss the implications of these observations for our understanding of how meaning works in linguistic and non-linguistic systems. In particular, I show that for certain pieces of pictorial content, the at-issue vs. not-at-issue distinction is highly pragmatic, in a way that strongly resembles the restricting vs. non-restricting distinction in natural language modifiers. I, furthermore, demonstrate that such pieces of pictorial content also behave like modifiers for the purposes of ellipsis/anaphora resolution and alternative generation under only. Thus, I argue that the at-issue vs. not-at-issue distinction in these cases should, in fact, be analyzed in terms of restricting vs. non-restricting modification, rather than presuppositions contributed sublexically. These findings point to substantial parallels between pictures and natural language with respect to both pragmatic reasoning and compositional structuring of meaning.
KW - At-issueness
KW - Composition
KW - Non-restricting modifiers
KW - Pictorial semantics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85110428844&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.5334/GJGL.1314
DO - https://doi.org/10.5334/GJGL.1314
M3 - مقالة
SN - 2397-1835
VL - 6
JO - Glossa
JF - Glossa
IS - 1
M1 - 83
ER -