If pictures are stative, what does this mean for discourse interpretation?

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to explore the consequences of adopting Abusch (2014)’s hypothesis about pictures—that they are stative depictions of the world—for the interpreta-tion of discourses. We focus on the phenomenon of narrative progression and reject Abusch’s proposal that aspectual differences between linguistic and pictorial narrative do not factor in providing a uniform analysis across media. Based on eventive-stative sequences in linguistic narrative, we develop a new answer within Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. We state a single pragmatic algorithm that exploits the aspectual differences between linguistic and pictorial narratives to derive the correct predictions.