Abstract
Davidsonian event semantics is often taken to form an unhappy marriage with compositional semantics. For example, it has been claimed to be problematic for semantic accounts of quantification (Beaver and Condoravdi, in: Aloni et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the 16th Amsterdam Colloquium, 2007), for classical accounts of negation (Krifka, in: Bartsch et al. (eds.) Semantics and contextual expression, 1989), and for intersective accounts of verbal coordination (Lasersohn, in Plurality, conjunction and events, 1995). This paper shows that none of this is the case, once we abandon the idea that the event variable is bound at sentence level, and assume instead that verbs denote existential quantifiers over events. Quantificational arguments can then be given a semantic account, negation can be treated classically, and coordination can be modeled as intersection. The framework presented here is a natural choice for researchers and fieldworkers who wish to sketch a semantic analysis of a language without being forced to make commitments about the hierarchical order of arguments, the argument-adjunct distinction, the default scope of quantifiers, or the nature of negation and coordination.
Highlights
Ever since Montague famously rejected the contention that there is any important theoretical difference between formal and natural languages, research on compositional semantics in his spirit has produced successful accounts of the behavior of scope-taking expressions (Montague 1970)
I have shown that Neo-Davidsonian event semantics does not pose a particular problem for popular compositional semantic accounts of quantification, negation and conjunction
Event semantics is compatible with accounts of these phenomena that relate them to their counterparts in predicate logic, such as ¬ and ∧
Summary
Ever since Montague famously rejected the contention that there is any important theoretical difference between formal and natural languages, research on compositional semantics in his spirit has produced successful accounts of the behavior of scope-taking expressions (Montague 1970) Those expressions in natural language that have counterparts in predicate logic and related systems, such as quantifiers, negation, and conjunctions, have been given formal accounts. In many implementations of event semantics in compositional frameworks, accounts of scope-taking expressions such as quantifiers, negation, and conjunctions need to be complicated compared with the more standard treatments that would be available if events were not present. For semanticists who reject quantifying-in or quantifier raising as an option, such as Beaver & Condoravdi and Eckardt, it is possible to adopt a semantic approach to quantifier scope in a completely standard event-based framework.
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