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Event Semantics: A Husserlian Critique

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Abstract

Event semantics is concerned with the formal structure of sentences which appear to describe an event of some kind, e.g. ‘Brutus kills Caesar,’ or ‘My tooth fell out.’ Phenomenologists should be interested in work in this field, if they hope to rescue Husserl’s phenomenology of judgment from its narrow focus on copular judgments of the form ‘S is p.’ An adequate phenomenology of judgment must ultimately develop an account of judgments whose intentional correlates seem to be events, rather than states of affairs, since such judgments are ubiquitous. For this endeavor, existing work on the formal structure of event sentences provides a crucial foothold. However, phenomenologists cannot simply import semantic theories for their own use, without first evaluating them for phenomenological plausibility. This concern is particularly acute in the case of the widely-adopted “Davidsonian” approach, according to which the logical structure of event sentences diverges radically from natural language syntax. The Davidsonian form introduces a “covert” variable, which stands in for an event. Thus, the sentence ‘Brutus kills Caesar’ becomes, ‘There is an event e that is a killing of Caesar by Brutus.’ Such a theory, if correct, would have decisive consequences for the phenomenology of event sentences, and even of events themselves. Yet the introduction of covert variables in turn introduces—I argue—a covert intentional object, without assessing this idea for phenomenological plausibility. Building on Husserl’s phenomenology of predication, I develop a criterion for evaluating this hypothesis, and argue that the Davidsonian approach, as it stands, is phenomenologically untenable.

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Notes

  1. See Zlatev (2010) however, for a discussion of some deficiencies in the conception of phenomenology employed in “mainstream” cognitive linguistics.

  2. It is not self-evident that modifier-dropping entailments should be a matter of logical form. For contrary views and discussion, see Cresswell (1974) and Thomason & Stalnaker (1973).

  3. Such mechanisms have been proposed, of course. See Graves (1993), and Beaver and Condoravdi (2007).

  4. For arguments that we can, in fact, limit standby positions in a principled way, see Schwartz (1975) and Stanosz (1978).

  5. Whether we represent this as suggested, or as ʻWith(a knife, e),’ or in some other way, does not bear on the point at issue here, namely the use of event variables to explain entailment relations. Throughout the paper I will adopt the simplest possible Davidsonian forms.

  6. Landman (2000, pp. 2–15) provides a useful and thorough discussion of the parallels between the “classical semantic theory” for adjectives and the Davidsonian approach to adverbs.

  7. ʻThere is an event e which is a building of a house by Mary; and there is a time which is earlier than now, and which is the time when that event culminated.’

  8. ʻThere is an event which is a run by Mary, and which is holding now.’

  9. See Sect. 4, however, for discussion of a deficiency in Parsons’ proposal that arises precisely because it fails to capture apparent entailment relations.

  10. This is what Husserl describes “as an elucidation and clarification, as a more precise determination of what is indeterminate in the horizon-form” (1939, p. 140; 1973, p. 124).

  11. It is “bound to the immediate intuition of the substrate, whether this intuition is self-giving or reproductive” (1939, p. 231; 1973, p. 197).

  12. ʻThere is an event e, such that e is a burning, and the agent of e is Agatha, and the patient of e is wood.’

  13. ʻFor every event e, if e is a burning, then oxygen is consumed.’

  14. See Rothstein (1998, p. 5) for a brief discussion of the dispensability of anaphoric evidence. See Landman (2000, pp. 18–19) for an argument that Parsons’ ‘burnings’ argument is dispensable.

  15. The last conjunct could be rendered ʻTo(top of the hill, e),’ or in some more complex way. See fn. 5.

  16. ‘For a minute’ is marginally acceptable for (21), but only if we understand ‘to the top of the hill’ to mean ‘towards the top of the hill’.

  17. I include ‘vigorous’ here in order to force the reading of ‘running’ as a nominal, rather than a verbal gerundive. The verbal gerundive is marginally acceptable, as in ʻWe observed Melanie’s vigorously running to the top of the hill.’ But this is irrelevant, as ‘running’ here does not function as a noun, as is evident from its modification by an adverb.

  18. A rough logical form would be as follows, with ʻΘ(e′, e)’ standing in for whatever constitutive or causal relation holds between the two events: ʻ(Ǝe)(Running(e) ∧ Agent(Melanie, e) ∧ Vigorous(e) ∧ (Ǝe′)(Θ(e′, e) ∧ Run(e′) ∧ To-the-top-of-hill(e′))).’

  19. Pustejovsky (1991) does propose a semantics which multiplies the event arguments introduced by a verb, in order to account for complexities in event structure (e.g. transitions from one state to another). Yet since his theory is primarily designed to elucidate lexical structure (rather than entailment relations or anaphora) it does not necessarily imply that these events be cognitively realized as predicative subjects.

  20. For example, one could respond to (26)–(31) by suggesting the underlying form should not directly predicate ‘To-the-top-of-the-hill’ of an event. Instead it should indicate that the event stopped at the top of the hill, using e.g. the predication ‘End(top of the hill, e).’ ‘Melanie’s running stopped at the top of the hill’ certainly poses no problems.

  21. For a proposal along these lines, see Roeper (1987). While Roeper’s approach can hardly be called phenomenological, it is worth noting that it is motivated in part by his “semantic intuitions,” namely that nouns are referring expressions while verbs are not.

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Acknowledgements

Matthew Ally supplied crucially helpful feedback for an earlier draft of this paper. A shorter version was presented at the 2017 meeting of the Husserl Circle; I am grateful for the suggestions and encouragement I received from attenders, and especially for the excellent comments presented by Corijn Van Mazijk. Support for this project was provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.

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  1. Department of Social Sciences, Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York, 199 Chambers Street, New York, NY, 10007, USA

    Andrés Colapinto

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Colapinto, A. Event Semantics: A Husserlian Critique. Husserl Stud 34, 123–143 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-017-9222-3

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