Event semantics

Explain the use of events in semantical theory

Here’s a compact tour of how “events” are used in formal (truth-conditional) semantics.

What’s an “event”?

In semantics, an event is an abstract object corresponding to what a verb describes—running, breaking, arriving, etc. (Often “eventuality” is used to include states like knowing or loving.) The key move is to treat verbs as introducing an extra argument: an event variable e. That gives us a place for time, location, manner, instruments, and participants to hook into the meaning.

Why introduce event variables?

Consider: Brutus stabbed Caesar with a knife in the forum at noon. Rather than packing all those modifiers into the verb’s argument list, we say:

∃e [ stabbing(e) ∧ Agent(e, Brutus) ∧ Theme(e, Caesar) ∧ With(e, a-knife) ∧ In(e, the-forum) ∧ At(e, noon) ]

Now all the adjuncts (with/in/at/carefully/again) uniformly describe properties of the same event e. This yields clean composition and the right entailments.

Davidsonian → neo-Davidsonian

• Davidsonian semantics: Verbs take an event argument; core participants (subject/object) are still direct arguments of the verb.

• Neo-Davidsonian semantics: Decompose further; thematic roles become predicates relating participants to the event (Agent(e,x), Theme(e,y), Goal(e,z)…). This helps with:

  • Alternations (active/passive, dative shift): same event, different syntactic realization.
  • Implicit arguments (e.g., The window broke): the breaking event can exist without overt Agent.
  • Cross-linguistic variation: languages package roles differently; events stay constant.

What events buy us (empirically)

• Adjunct modification: Manner (carefully), place (in Rome), time (at noon), instrument (with a knife), frequency (often) all conjoin as predicates of e.
• Scope & ambiguity: John didn’t open the door carefully can mean no opening event vs. there was an opening but not careful; different readings are modeled by where negation takes scope relative to the event predicate and the manner predicate.
• Quantificational adverbs: usually, often, always can quantify over events or situations rather than individuals, explaining sentences like Dogs usually bark (quantifying over barking events).
• Aspect & telicity: Event structure distinguishes activities (atelic: run), accomplishments (telic: build a house), achievements (instantaneous: arrive), states (stative: know). Telicity interacts with objects (e.g., eat an apple vs. eat apples), modeled via how events “map” to incremental themes.
• Tense & temporal relations: Tense relates a reference time to the time of the event. Perfects, progressives, and temporal connectives (before/after) compare event times; this integrates smoothly with Reichenbach/Kamp style timelines.
• Causation & subevents: Causatives (make/let, resultatives) relate events via CAUSE(e1,e2) or by building subevent structures (e.g., a causing subevent and a resulting change).
• Plural & cumulative readings: We can use mereology over events (sum events, parts) to capture readings like Two guards watched three doors where many small watching events compose into a bigger one.

How composition usually works (in brief)

• VP denotes a set of events (λe. …).
• Modifiers (PPs, adverbs) are predicates of events that intersect with the VP meaning (conjunction).
• DPs are plugged in via role predicates (Agent/Theme/Goal), allowing flexibility across syntactic alternations.

Events vs. states

States can be treated as “eventualities” with special properties (no dynamic change, different compatibility with in/for adverbials, etc.). Many frameworks keep a single event/state argument to maintain uniformity, while capturing their different grammatical behavior via lexical aspect features.

Limits & alternatives

• Some phenomena can be modeled with situation semantics or property-of-times analyses instead; in practice, modern work often blends these with event arguments.
• Which thematic roles are primitive, how many there are, and how they’re linked to syntax is debated; many theories favor underspecified roles or derive them from more general principles.

One more worked example

Mary quietly opened the door with a key. ∃e [ open(e) ∧ Agent(e, Mary) ∧ Theme(e, the-door) ∧ With(e, a-key) ∧ Quiet(e) ]

Every modifier attaches uniformly to the same e, delivering the right truth conditions and letting us compute scope and aspect compositionally.

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Takeaway: Event semantics adds a single, silent ingredient—the event variable—that turns verbs into predicates of events. That simple move yields a remarkably uniform account of modifiers, aspect, tense, alternations, quantificational adverbs, causation, and plurality, while keeping the compositional machinery tidy.