Phil 565: The Grammar of Events

(USC graduate seminar, Fall 2024) Born in the philosophy of action, the claim that sentences like Bill kicked Carl express descriptions of events—rather than mere relations between individuals—has blossomed into several decades of incredibly productive research in natural language syntax and semantics. Since its inception, the 'event semantics' framework has profitably engaged metaphysical questions about what events are, whether there are fundamentally different kinds of 'eventualities', which events are to be properly counted as 'agential', and, more generally, what it means to be a privileged 'participant' in an event, as opposed to a mere bystander. Applications of the framework have also uncovered systematic cross-linguistic patterning in the grammatical encoding of such notions. Davidson (1967) initiates the project by noting a wide range of systematic, intuitively-valid reasoning patterns in natural language that cannot be modeled as logical validities under standard first-order assumptions. In response, he revises the logic so that at least action verbs in English translate as predicates with additional argument positions that, he argues, range over 'events'. Fast forward almost 60 years, and a growing number of linguistic semanticists suppose that even simple clauses like It rained involve multiple layers of event description (e.g. Schein 2016). Meanwhile, applications of 'the event analysis' have been shown to be critical for the analysis of aspect, attitude reports, modal claims, and more. Yet, these developments have proceeded almost entirely outside of contemporary philosophy of language. This course aims to remedy that. In the first part, we read and discuss classic papers towards establishing an event-semantic framework for the analysis of natural language. In the second part, we discuss works at the cutting-edge of this framework. On the first meeting, I introduce Davidson's core arguments and some assumptions from theoretical linguistics that will be useful throughout the semester. The remaining meetings will focus on a targeted paper or small collection of papers, with discussion led by students or invited faculty experts (Paul Pietroski, Valentine Hacquard, Alexander Williams, Daniel Altshuler).