Volume 31, Issue 3 - On the limits of the Davidsonian approach: The case of copula sentences

Since Donald Davidson’s seminal work ‘‘The Logical Form of Action Sentences’’ (1967) event arguments have become an integral component of virtually every semantic theory. Over the past years Davidson’s proposal has been continuously extended such that nowadays event(uality) arguments are generally associated not only with action verbs but with predicates of all sorts. The reasons for such an extension are seldom explicitly justified. Most problematical in this respect is the case of stative expressions. By taking a closer look at copula sentences the present study assesses the legitimacy of stretching the Davidsonian notion of events and discusses its consequences. A careful application of some standard eventuality diagnostics (perception reports, combination with locative modifiers and manner adverbials) as well as some new diagnostics (behavior of certain degree adverbials) reveals that copular expressions do not behave as expected under a Davidsonian perspective: they fail all eventuality tests, regardless of whether they represent stage-level or individual-level predicates. In this respect, copular expressions pattern with stative verbs like know , hate , and resemble , which in turn differ sharply from state verbs like stand , sit , and sleep . The latter pass all of the eventuality tests and therefore qualify as true ‘‘Davidsonian state’’ expressions. On the basis of these empirical observations and taking up ideas of Kim (1969, 1976) and Asher (1993, 2000), an alternative account of copular expressions (and stative verbs) is provided, according to which the copula introduces a referential argument for a temporally bound property exemplification (= ‘‘Kimian state’’). Considerations on some logical properties, viz. closure conditions and the latent infinite regress of eventualities, suggest that supplementing Davidsonian eventualities with Kimian states may yield not only a more adequate analysis of copula sentences but also a better understanding of eventualities in general.

In her proposal Claudia Maienborn attempts to provide evidence above all for the following basic claims: First, stative verbal expressions, regardless of whether they represent stage-level or individual-level predicates, pattern with eventive expressions in introducing a hidden referential argument which can be located in time and may serve as an antecedent for anaphoric reference. What separates statives from eventives is that their arguments are not dynamic but static entities, that is, states.

Maienborn (this volume) presents a proposal on how to deal with stative expressions which makes the following claims: (i) There are two types of stative expressions, those denoting Davidsonian states ( sit, stand, sleep ), which constitute a subtype of Davidsonian eventualities, and Kimian states ( know, hate, resemble , and all expressions introduced by the copula), which are of a different ontological sort. This distinction is not tied to a distinction between stage-level and individual-level predicates. (ii) Expressions introducing Davidsonian states behave like eventdenoting expressions and are different from expressions introducing Kimian states with respect to a number of linguistic phenomena (embedding under perception verbs, modification by locative, manner, and instrumental adverbials, interpretation of certain degree modifiers). Kimian states can be temporally modified, anaphorically referred to, and in German they can enter the dabei-  construction. (iii) While Davidsonian eventualities are spatio-temporal entities, Kimian states have a more abstract nature. In contrast to the more concrete ontological sort of eventualities, they don’t have a spatial dimension, and in contrast to the more abstract ontological sort of facts, they have a temporal dimension. Maienborn conceives of Kimian states as ‘‘abstract objects for the exemplification of a property P at a holder x and a time t.’’ (iv) The grammatical category of verbs is not confined to a particular sort of referential argument. While verbs are either Davidsonian or Kimian predicates, lexical predicates that depend on a copula don’t make ontological choices on their own. It is always the copula that introduces a Kimian state argument. In the following section I mainly want to comment on (iii) and (iv). In doing that, I will try to refine some ideas about the ontological nature of Kimian states and I will challenge the assumption that it is the copula which introduces the state argument.

1. Event positions Donald Davidson proposed in 1967, and elaborated in subsequent work, the thesis that action predicates in natural language contain an argument position ranging over events, a position that in simple sentences was cashed out through existential quantification. As Claudia Maienborn remarks, Davidson’s proposal is naturally extended from action predicates to predicates of all sorts; thus for instance I myself proposed that it extend to all heads in the X' system, including Nouns. A number of linguistic contexts, including those of causation (a relation between events), and accomplishment predicates (involving two events, as process and telos), invite us to consider event complexes. Moreover, there is reason to appeal to an ‘‘E-position’’, as I called it, within modifiers that are themselves predicates of events (I expand upon this point in section 3 below). As Maienborn appreciates, the analytic wheel has turned: instead of looking for detailed considerations that would practically compel acknowledgement of the E-position in this or that construction, we assume that the position is always available, and we take the consequences for universal language design and for language difference, both syntactic and semantic.

The pioneering work of Davidson (1967) gave rise to a productive and exciting tradition within formal semantics and especially at the interface between syntax and semantics, whereby event variables were exploited as elements of the referential ontology in the expression of the semantics of natural language. The existence of such logical elements (events, or eventuality variables) cannot seriously now be doubted, in my opinion, although many aspects of the formal theory of syntax and semantics have changed in the nearly forty years since Davidson’s seminal article. The time has definitely come for a more critical and nuanced understanding of the use of eventuality variables, in the light of recent research in the field. Maienborn (this volume) is an important example of this kind of work. She takes a new look at the idea of eventuality variables and argues that the case has been overstated, that there are both empirical and conceptual reasons for denying the existence of events in the Davidsonian sense for a certain class of statives and copular predications. I wish to show in this article that Maienborn both goes too far and not far enough in deconstructing the traditional Davidsonian assumptions. Instead, I propose a Davidson-inspired method of representation which fits better with current syntactic understanding, but which is liberated from some of the assumptions and methodologies of earlier work – I call this ‘Post-Davidsonianism’. I will argue that once one makes the adjustments in the Davidsonian tradition to make the idea coherent, Maienborn’s arguments for introducing a new ontological type (‘Kimian states’) into the system disappear.

This very interesting paper investigates differences between copula verbs on the one hand, and ‘truly eventive’ verbs, on the other, discussing a number of important topics, including the effect of word order on modification relations, and the difference between internal and external event modification. The core claim of the paper is that states and eventualities have a different logical structure, and that the differences between them follow from this. Rather than commenting directly on the arguments made in the paper, I am going to concentrate in my response on this issue, trying to show that statives and eventualities are more similar than Maienborn assumes, and suggesting that the differences between them might be explained without postulating different logical structures.

‘‘Comments are very welcome!’’ This basic attitude and the many ways of implementing it contribute immensely to the fascination of engaging in scientific research. I am grateful to Theoretical Linguistics for providing a public platform for this kind of scholarly exchange and I thank all commentators for their thoughtful, stimulating, and often challenging contributions to my target article. My response will address two main issues that are raised by the commentaries. The first issue is shaped by a cluster of questions relating to ontology. The second issue concerns questions of methodology pertaining in particular to the problem of judging data.