Event guises and subsituations: A truth-conditional reply to Pietroski
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Denis Delfitto
Denis Delfitto is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Verona. His publications – in international scientific journals and peer-reviewed volumes – span from the syntax of reference and quantification in natural language – including issues of comparative syntax and semantics – to issues of language change and language impairment. His core interest is the investigation of the human capacity for language from a broad cognitive and philosophical perspective.
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Gaetano Fiorin
Gaetano Fiorin is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Trieste. His research focuses on theoretical linguistics (particularly model-theoretic semantics and the syntax-semantics interface), experimental linguistics (language development, language impairments, and multilingualism) and the philosophy of language (in particular, the metaphysics of meaning and the interface between language and cognition).
Abstract
This paper revisits Pietroski’s challenge to truth-conditional semantics, focusing on his critique of Davidsonian event semantics in the case of mutual chases, which provide an intriguing exemplification of the complex interaction between logical forms and ambiguous contexts of utterance. Pietroski argues that truth-conditional analyses either collapse into contradiction or demand dubious metaphysical commitments, pushing us instead toward a purely procedural, concept-assembly view of meaning. Building on Quine’s “double-vision” puzzle, we defend truth-conditional semantics by introducing the notion of event guises: role-indexed properties of a single complex event. We argue that guises are supported not by subevents or perspectival constructs, but by minimal subsituations in Kratzer’s sense, i.e. informational parts of the situation that supports the event. This analysis dissolves apparent contradictions, preserves a lean ontology of events, and accommodates adverbial modification without metaphysical extravagance. The upshot is a hybrid event–situation semantics that shows why logical forms remain robustly truth-conditional, contra Pietroski’s skepticism.
About the authors
Denis Delfitto is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Verona. His publications – in international scientific journals and peer-reviewed volumes – span from the syntax of reference and quantification in natural language – including issues of comparative syntax and semantics – to issues of language change and language impairment. His core interest is the investigation of the human capacity for language from a broad cognitive and philosophical perspective.
Gaetano Fiorin is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Trieste. His research focuses on theoretical linguistics (particularly model-theoretic semantics and the syntax-semantics interface), experimental linguistics (language development, language impairments, and multilingualism) and the philosophy of language (in particular, the metaphysics of meaning and the interface between language and cognition).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Istvan Kecskes
- What did we learn from Istvan Kecskes? Introductory notes
- Research Articles
- Indexical shift
- Event guises and subsituations: A truth-conditional reply to Pietroski
- Rooth-Partee conditionals and the symmetry of disjunction
- “The faith of a grain of mustard seed”: A semantic and intercultural perspective
- Silent imperatives: A multimodal approach to warning expressions
- Negotiating interactional routines in the openings of intercultural first encounters
- An exploration of quasi-proper names based on Japanese data: Insights from cross-linguistic and language-specific perspectives
- Illocutionary conditionals and discourse strategies in aphasia: A corpus-based analysis
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Istvan Kecskes
- What did we learn from Istvan Kecskes? Introductory notes
- Research Articles
- Indexical shift
- Event guises and subsituations: A truth-conditional reply to Pietroski
- Rooth-Partee conditionals and the symmetry of disjunction
- “The faith of a grain of mustard seed”: A semantic and intercultural perspective
- Silent imperatives: A multimodal approach to warning expressions
- Negotiating interactional routines in the openings of intercultural first encounters
- An exploration of quasi-proper names based on Japanese data: Insights from cross-linguistic and language-specific perspectives
- Illocutionary conditionals and discourse strategies in aphasia: A corpus-based analysis
