Speaking of Events (review)

We refer to this chair as well as to the death of Caesar. We also implicitly refer to events when we say that if Brutus stabbed Caesar with a knife, then, undoubtedly, he stabbed Caesar. Event-talk has intrigued philosophers and linguists alike. This volume shows some areas of fruitful interaction between the philosophical and linguistic articulations of the event concept.

The introductory chapter by Fabio Pianesi and Achille C. Varzi provides linguists with some philosophical background. Metaphysical theories of events differ with respect to whether events are universals, which recur, or particulars. Those that take events to be particulars have to explain why we can say that John takes the same walk every evening. The chapter by Johannes Brandl examines event recurrence and considers the controversial notion of ‘concrete universals’. Masses can be shown concrete universals: They can be instantiated at different places and times while occurring at specific places and times. On the basis of recurrence, he argues that events are concrete universals.

Theories that take events to be particulars differ with respect to whether the occurrence of an event prevents other events from occurring in the same spatiotemporal region. In Donald Davidson’s early works two different events can co-occur in the same spatiotemporal region to the extent that they have different causes and effects. Regine Eckardt analyzes the use of causation as a relation between events and concludes that sentences of the kind A caused B are not of the same kind. Some are true causal statements, others are pseudocausal statements, counterfactuals that involve the focusing of a certain property.

Two chapters focus on explicit reference to events. Nicholas Asher explores the problem of evolutive anaphora: how to account for the fact that when a discourse introduces an event of creation, a new object becomes available for subsequent narrative, and when an event of destruction is introduced, an object that was available for anaphoric reference is no longer available. He contends that to understand evolutive anaphora we need to distinguish between events, facts, and propositions.

Take the following two sentences: (1) Jane turned the corner. (2) She noticed a car parked in an alley. If we are presented with 2 before 1, we are entitled to conclude that Jane noticed a car before turning the corner. Reversing the order of presentation entitles us to conclude the opposite. The same does not happen with: (1) Jane was patrolling the neighborhood and (2) She noticed a car parked in an alley. Alice Ter Meulen presents a framework capable of dealing with such temporal reasoning in discourse: dynamic aspect trees.

Terence Parsons asks whether stative sentences implicitly quantify over states. We know that from Brutus stabbed Caesar violently and Brutus stabbed Caesar with a knife we cannot conclude that Brutus stabbed Caesar violently with a knife, but from Socrates lies in the marketplace and Socrates lies under an awning we can conclude that Socrates lies in the market under an awning. This is good evidence against the underlying state analysis. However, Parsons notes that the force of the entailment lies in the fact that people cannot be in different places at the same time, which is an empirical, not a logical, fact. The entailment is not an argument against the underlying state analysis.

Two contributions deal with the telicity/atelicity distinction. James Higginbotham argues that telic sentences differ from atelic ones in that only the logical form of the former involves a pair of eventive variables, one of which explicitly represents the telos.

Henk J. Verkuyl neglects that the thematic grid of verbs include an event position. He reconstructs aspectual shifts by resorting to abstract time structures and NP denotations. The role of a VP denotation is to relate the subject denotation with pairs that consist of a time and an abstract position in the object denotation, where ‘position’ is...