Abstract:
Pictures are semantically structured, but how? And how does that structure relate to their spatial structure? One answer to these questions is offered by the Parts Principle: where a picture P depicts some object or scene O, every spatial part of P depicts some spatial part of O. Taking that principle as my point of departure, I will introduce some further notions needed to refine it in the face of serious challenges, and use the result to raise some novel questions in picture semantics.