Prof. Dorit Abusch, Cornell University 

Anaphoric relations in sequential and conflated pictures

ABSTRACT:

Pictorial representation, and in particular sequential art (i.e. comics) 
can function as a counterpoint for natural language semantics and  
pragmatics, where information is conveyed in a very different way,  
but where nevertheless phenomena recur that are familiar from 
natural language. A pure case is provided by sequential art without  
speech bubbles, thought bubbles, or captions, what I call
"silent comics". This presentation will focus on issues of co-reference.

A basic operation in understanding a comic is parsing the pictures into 
parts denoting individuals, and identifying these individuals across frames.
Starting with a denotational conception of the information content of an 
individual picture as being a set of possible situations, I suggest adding
discourse referents and identity predications among them to produce a  
DRT-like representation. Discourse referents are modeled as areas of  
pictures. The representation is comparable both to indexing and 
discourse representation in linguistic theory, and perceptual indexing in  
vision.  It comes out in the semantic model that disourse referents for 
individuals depicted in different pictures are existentially quantified, 
and co-indexing is purely pragmatic. This is compared to the situation in 
languages such as Chinese without definiteness marking.  It is usually  
assumed in theoretical accounts of such languages that a definiteness  
feature is present syntactically, or is added in the syntax-semantics  
interface.  Finally I look at continuous and conflated narrative, where  
one area of a picture depicts an object or individual in two or more  
temporally separate but spatially overlapping scenes. I argue that this 
provides represented coindexing, and look at examples from Indian art.