Events, situations, and adverbs

Abstract

Let us return to Davidson's and Perry's analyses of event sentences, to see how they fare in the light of the data and the theory presented here. We have adopted Davidson's analysis of manner adverbials wholesale, so we are in complete agreement with him on that point. We sharply disagree with him, however, on the possibility of associating event-like entities (i.e., situations) with whole sentences, and we find them absolutely necessary to account for the fact use of adverbs, a case Davidson fails to consider. Perry, on the other hand, rightly takes Davidson to task for his faulty argument against associating something like situations with whole sentences, but then fails to look closely enough at the data to see that something like Davidson's analysis is still needed to account for the detailed facts about manner adverbials.