VEGEDOG - FORMALISM, VEGETARIAN DOGS, AND PARTONOMIES IN TRANSITION

The pragmatics of 'vegetarian' and 'carnivorous' exhibits an asymmetry that we put in evidence by analyzing a newspaper report about vegetar ian dog-owners imposing a vegetarian diet on their pets. More fundamen tal is the problem of partonomy versus containment, for which we attem pt a naive but formal analysis applied to ingestion and the food chain , an issue we derive from the same text analyzed. Our formal tools bel ong in commonsense modelling, a domain of artificial intelligence rela ted to extra-linguistic knowledge and pragmatics. We first provide an interpretation of events analyzed, and express it graphically in a sem antic-network related representation. Then we criticize that intepreta tion, and propose an alternative that we express in terms of a modal l ogic, avoiding the full representational power of Hayes's ''ontology f or liquids''.