The Birth of an Icon
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.