In this paper, I make novel empirical observations about not-at-issue content in pictures, focusing on prohibition signs, and discuss the implications of these observations for our understanding of how meaning works in linguistic and non-linguistic systems. In particular, I show that for certain pieces of pictorial content, the at-issue vs. not-atissue distinction is highly pragmatic, in a way that strongly resembles the restricting vs. non-restricting distinction in natural language modifiers.

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... I, furthermore, demonstrate that such pieces of pictorial content also behave like modifiers for the purposes of ellipsis/anaphora resolution and alternative generation under only. Thus, I argue that the at-issue vs. not-at-issue distinction in these cases should, in fact, be analyzed in terms of restricting vs. non-restricting modification, rather than presuppositions contributed sublexically. These findings point to substantial parallels between pictures and natural language with respect to both pragmatic reasoning and compositional structuring of meaning. this respect not-at-issue pictorial content resembles non-restricting modifiers in language, i.e., instances of subsective modifiers that are truth-conditionally vacuous in the context of a given utterance. In section 3, I provide evidence that some pieces of pictorial content are, in fact, treated as modifiers within a compositional structure, rather than sublexical pieces of holistic meanings, based on their behavior during ellipsis/anaphora resolution and alternative generation under only. I, therefore, conclude that the at-issue vs. not-at-issue distinction for such pieces of content is indeed best captured via the notions of restricting vs. non-restricting modification rather than the more obscure notion of "cosuppositions", introduced in Schlenker 2018a for co-speech gestures and facial expressions and extended to other types of meaning-bearing expressions in Schlenker 2018b and to pieces of pictorial content in Schlenker 2019. This is in line with the similar treatment of various "secondary channel" meaning-bearing expressions in spoken language utterances that behave like subsective modifiers in Esipova 2019a; c; 2020. Section 4 summarizes the main empirical, theoretical, and methodological points of the paper and makes suggestions for future research.