A Remark on the Ontology of Davidsonian Events

Abstract

Since Davidson's (1967) suggestion of introducing the abstract unit of events into semantics, there have been several major attempts to extend the notion of events and comprise statives into a unified theory (Higginbotham 1985, 2000, Parsons 1990, 2000). My first goal in this paper is to make a close examination of statives in several linguistic phenomena and reveal that only a certain type of statives (i.e., dynamic statives such as lie, stand, etc.), not the other type (i.e., non-dynamic statives such as know, resemble, etc.), show the same pattern with action verbs. This observation suggests that any attempt to extend the semantics of events to statives must take this contrast into account. My second goal is to clarify the status of Davidsonian events (e), suggesting that they should not be identified with Kratzerian spatio-temporal locations (l) (Kratzer 1989, 1995, Diesing 1992).