Possible‐Worlds Semantics for Pictures

In the philosophy of language and linguistic semantics, there is an approach to semantics and pragmatics that proceeds by assigning semantic values to sentences, and then reasoning about pragmatics in terms of these semantic values. Classically, the semantic value of a sentence is a proposition, constructed as a set of possible worlds. This chapter looks at the application of the same scheme to the semantics of pictures, and to the semantics and pragmatics of narratives such as comics that are constructed as sequences of pictures. Section 2 explains a method for mapping pictures to propositions. Essentially, the semantic value of a picture is the set of worlds that project to the picture via a geometric projection procedure such as perspectival projection. Section 3 looks at the temporal interpretation of pictorial narratives. Another pragmatic aspect of pictorial narratives is anaphora or indexing across pictures in a sequence. Section 4 treats this via the syntactic introduction of discourse referents, and interpretation of the resulting representations in a dynamic semantic system. Section 5 reviews the semantics of sentences that describe pictures, and an argument based on such sentences that the semantic value of pictures should represent viewpoints along with worlds. Section 6 develops an analogy between ambiguous pictures such as Necker cubes and syntactic ambiguity in natural language. Section 7 reviews perceptual semantics for pictures, which considers the effect of pictures on viewers.