Dorit Abusch (Cornell University): Pictorial Discourse Referents, Bridging and Continuous Narrative

This talk looks at the discourse semantics of pictorial narrative with examples from comics, Indian art, and European art.  Starting with a geometric semantics for pictures, discourse referents are introduced as areas of a picture.  Pictorial narratives that have been enriched with discourse referents and equalities between them are interpreted as sets of sequences of scenes, using a recursive definition. The last part looks at continuous and conflated narratives, where a part of a picture is shared between different times in the described sequence of scenes.