Events in semantics

Alexander Williams

Abstract: Event Semantics (ES) says that clauses in natural languages are descriptions of events. Why believe this? The answer cannot be that we use clauses to talk about events, or that events are important in ontology or psychology. Other sorts of things have the same properties, but no special role in semantics. The answer must be that this view helps to explain the semantics of natural languages. But then, what is it to explain the semantics of natural languages? Here there are many approaches, differing on, among other issues, whether natural languages are social and objective or individual and mental; whether the semantics delivers truth values at contexts or just constraints on truth-evaluable thoughts; which inferences it should explain as formally provable, if any; and which if any grammatical patterns it should explain directly. The argument for ES will differ accordingly, as will the consequences, for ontology, psychology, or linguistics, of its endorsement. In this chapter I trace the outlines of this story. I begin by saying what ES is. Section 20. 3 then describes its main motive: with it we can treat a dependent phrase and its syntactic host as separate predicates of related or identical events. The next four sections, 20. 4–7, each sketch one argument in favor of this: ES can be used to state certain grammatical generalizations, formalize patterns of entailment, provide an extensional semantics for adverbs, and derive certain sentence meanings that cannot plausibly be derived otherwise. The last argument, while less familiar, is stronger than the others, compelling ES. But section 20. 8 sounds an alarm. The analyses that motivate ES will systematically validate inferences that are unsound, at least if we think conventionally about events and semantics. Sections 20. 9–12 each exemplify one response. The first rejects the analyses that motivate ES (Dowty, 1991); another dismisses our ordinary conception of events (Parsons, 1990); a third relativizes all event predicates to a perspective (Schein, 2017); and a fourth denies that semantics traffics in truth (Pietroski, 2018). The moral is, we cannot maintain both an ordinary metaphysics and a truth-conditional semantics that is simple. Those who would accept ES, and draw conclusions about the world or how we view it, must therefore choose which concession to make.