Verbs of Creation and Depiction: More Events in the Semantics of English

This paper addresses some problems about the semantics of two groups of transitive verbs that are intensional in certain ways. One group is that of creation verbs, such as ‘assemble’, ‘bake’, ‘build’, and ‘manufacture’. The other is that of depiction verbs, such as ‘draw’, ‘sketch’, ‘caricature’, ‘sculpt’, ‘write (about)’, ‘imagine’, and ‘fantasize’. Depiction verbs, and creation verbs in the progressive, can form verb phrases with quantified noun phrase (  ) complements that are not existentially committing, even when the  is existential. For instance, Guercino, in his The Aldrovandi Dog ( ca .  ), may have drawn a dog without there being any dog he drew, 1 and if Jack was building a house but stopped early enough in the process, there neither was nor is a house which he was building. I will argue that a certain general account of notional readings of verb phrases with more familiar intensional transitives, such as search verbs, can be extended to these less famil-