The object : substance :: event : process analogy

Linguists say that sentences are about events. Philosophers debate the metaphysics of event identity. Cognitive scientists posit event concepts to explain how creatures like us represent and reason about the world, and developmental psychologists ask how we come to have those concepts. But do we mean the same thing by ‘event’ (Casati and Varzi 2008; cf. Goldman 2007)? Our project aims to shed light on this question, in part, by studying the relationship between event semantics and event representations in the psychologist’s sense. Broadly, it explores the thesis that the semantic structure of event quantification, originally introduced into the literature with a metaphysical interpretation (Davidson 1967), reveals properties of how the mind structures its experience of the world. We investigate how language and representation relate in the event domain by following the lead of other semanticists and psychologists in analogizing to the object domain. Semantically, the referential properties of mass nouns like water, count nouns like cup, and plural noun phrases like cups are identifiable by demonstrating different combinations of cumulative, divisive, atomic, or plural reference (for early discussion, see Quine 1960, Cheng 1973, Cartwright 1975, Massey 1976, Burge 1977, Bunt 1979, 1985, Link 1983, Krifka 1989). Often, these combinations are understood to reflect real-world ontology: nouns that refer like water apply to substances, while cup applies to objects, and cups to pluralities of objects (Parsons 1979, Link 1983, Champollion 2010, among many others). Observing seemingly parallel referential properties in the verbal domain (Taylor 1977, Bach 1986a), many have adopted a parallel theory: verb phrases like sleep apply to processes or activities, while ‘once-only’ die applies to events, and jump (again and again) applies to pluralities of events. We aim to understand these properties in representational, rather than strict ontological terms.