meaning - What kind of noun is 'picture'?


I'm not sure of the right place to ask this, but I got confused trying to understand how the computer will interpret the sentence:



This is my picture.



In actual sense, the real owner of the picture should be the photographer not the person who was photographed... or am I getting something wrong? So, it seems the confusing thing about 'picture' is determining who the real owner of the picture is. So is there a special category for these kind of nouns or an official clarification somewhere?


Thanks



Answer



There is a class of noun called, interestingly, Picture Nouns. These include picture, description, story, painting, and any other noun that refers to a representation of something else. There are hundreds, and they have very peculiar syntax, because they're very peculiar semantically. All nouns are representations of something else, but picture nouns are representations of representations.


That means (using the Mind is a Container metaphor theme), that picture nouns have content, i.e, whatever it is that the picture, the description, the story, the painting, etc. represent. And that content may be referred to with the practically meaningless preposition of.


So my picture may mean



  • a picture that I own

  • a picture that I made

  • a picture that shows me


as well as many other things, not restricted to picture nouns, like



  • a picture that I sold/bought/signed/

  • a picture that I am particularly fond of

  • a picture that I mentioned in a previous utterance


Whereas a picture of Bill can only mean



  • a picture that shows Bill


while a picture of Bill's may mean the same thing, but may also mean



  • a picture that Bill owns

  • a picture that Bill made


Summary: Possessives do not always refer to ownership;
or, perhaps, ownership has more dimensions than one might expect.


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