Events vs situations

Compare Davidsonian events to Barwise & Perry situations

Here’s a crisp side-by-side to make the contrast clear.

Aspect	Davidsonian events	Barwise & Perry situations
What they are	Concrete spatiotemporal particulars (eventualities) that verbs talk about	Parts of the world (or information states) used to evaluate and represent content
Core semantic move	Add an event variable e as an extra argument of the verb; existentially close it and let modifiers predicate of e	Evaluate sentences relative to a situation s; meanings constrain which situations make them true (carry “infons”)
Canonical form	“John buttered the toast slowly in the bathroom” → ∃e[butter(e,j,toast) ∧ slow(e) ∧ in(e,bathroom)]	Truth is not global (whole world) but relative to partial s; a situation supports infons like ⟨butter, j, toast, +, t⟩
What they explain best	Adverbial/modifier syntax & scope, argument structure, anaphora to events (“This happened”, “So did Mary”)	Context dependence, partiality, domain restriction, attitude reports, information flow across discourse
Ontology & identity	Events are particulars; often individuated by spatiotemporal region/causal profile; come with mereology (subevents) and can include states as eventualities	Situations are partial; they can overlap, be nested; a world is a maximal situation; situations support sets of infons
Quantification & variables	Routine quantification over events (∃e, ∀e); thematic roles relate participants to e	Variables for situations (often both a resource situation for context and a described situation for content)
Truthmaking flavor	Eventive truths have events as natural truthmakers	Situations are general truthmakers: any sentence is supported by the right situation
Typical payoffs	Uniform account of manner/locatives/temporals, perception reports, aspect/telicity, event anaphora	Fine-grained content for attitudes (“reports about parts of worlds”), implicit domain restriction (“The windows are open” in this room)
Classic worries	Identity conditions for events; proliferation of silent structure; treatment of statives without overgeneration	Heavy machinery (infons/constraints), early formal complexity; overlap with later dynamic/situation approaches

How they fit together (not either/or)

They’re largely orthogonal: many contemporary analyses use both an event variable and a situation parameter. Intuitively, events are the things described, while situations are the contexts/parts of reality relative to which descriptions are evaluated and carried across discourse. So a clause can introduce an event e that occurs in (or is part of) a situation s.

Quick examples

• Event semantics sweet spot “John danced beautifully in the kitchen at midnight.” → One event e with predicates dance(e,j) ∧ beautiful(e) ∧ in(e,kitchen) ∧ at(e,midnight).

• Situation semantics sweet spot “The bottles are empty.” True relative to the bar-counter situation but false relative to the whole-house situation—no change in syntax needed; the situation parameter does the domain restriction.

Takeaway

• Use Davidsonian events when you need the internal structure of what happened (adverbs, arguments, aspect, event anaphora).
• Use B&P situations when you need the external structure of where/relative to what a claim is evaluated (context, partiality, attitudes, domain restriction).
• In practice, combine them: events give you fine-grained content, situations give you fine-grained context.