Fragment 1 (p.502-505)
From the perspective of how the predicates of natural language are used and understood, the
instant-based models for tense logic about which we have so far been talking appear to be not
just harmless idealizations; it is doubtful that the information which they treat as primitive –
i.e. what belongs to the extension of a predicate at an indivisible instant of time – can be
considered primitive at all. Let us explain.
Suppose that our semantics is instant-based […]. What, according to such a [semantics], is it
for Mary to be asleep at some instant t, or for Mary to be running at t, or for her to be writing
a letter at t? According to what we have been saying, Mary was sleeping at t if and only Mary
belongs to the extension of the predicate asleep […] at t. Similarly, Mary was running at t […]
if and and only if she belongs to the extension at t of run, and she was writing a letter at t if
and only there is some letter b such that the pair Mary,b belongs to the extension at t of the
two-place predicate write. To begin with the last case, what could it be about the way the
world […] is at the instant t that makes it true that Mary and b stand in the write relation at t?
The fact that her pen touches the paper on which the letter is being written? (We are assuming
that Mary is one of those rare, antiquated beings who write letters with pen and ink.) This
would clearly be too strong a requirement. For a good deal of the time that you are writing a
letter, even if you use pen and ink, your pen is not touching the paper. So perhaps it is no just
the fact that Mary’s pen is touching the paper which is sufficient ground for her standing in
the write relation to b; perhaps her holding the pen, in the way one holds a pen when one is
writing, is good enough? No, it isn’t good enough. Perhaps the letter she is writing is a
difficult one, and Mary has paused, putting down her pen, to think about the next sentence. Or
she has been interrupted by a telephone call, which forced her to put down her pen and stop
with the actual writing (which, however, she intends to resume as soon as she has dealt with
the caller).
One could go on, but the moral should be clear. What makes it true that at t Mary stood in the
write relation to b is, for all we can see, not just what is the case at that very instant, but what
is going on over some interval i surrounding t: At the start of i Mary sits down in front of a
blank sheet and at the end of it she folds the sheet, covered with her script, into an envelope.
What is the case just at the instant t, though not irrelevant to whether she was writing at t, is
never going to decide by itself whether she was writing at t or wasn’t.
As it stands, this is not a proof that a conceptually plausible instant semantics should be
impossible. Perhaps we might succeed in analysing Mary’s standing in the relation of writing
the letter b at t in terms of what is the case at successive instants of the interval i. But on
reflection it appears that such an analysis would be exceedingly far-fetched. Letters can be
written in all sorts of ways, at different speeds, with interruptions of varying length, etc. To
spell out conditions about series of ‘snapshots’ at instants surrounding t which are both
necessary and sufficient for Mary’s writing b at t would seem to be a thankless task at best.
[…]
We do not consider this argument absolutely conclusive. But it appears to us to have enough
force to cast serious doubt on the ultimate viability of an instant-based semantics for natural
language.
[…]
[W]e suggest[…] that Mary was writing a letter at the instant t if and only if t is one of a
series of stages which together constitute a complete letter writing. In slightly different words:
Mary was writing the letter at t provided that the event of her writing temporally included t.
[…]
Since the time when Davidson made his case that action-sentences should have logical forms
[with events in them], an impressive list of arguments, linguistic as well as philosophical,
have been given in support of it. Nevertheless the proposal has met with resistance, mostly
because it is so difficult to determine precisely what events are and what general properties
they have. Can events be interrupted and then, after a phase of non-existence, start up again?
Do all events have a spatial as well as a temporal location? If not, which events do and which
don’t? And for those that do, how is their spatial location determined? Can there be two
events that occupy exactly the same region of space and time? Is the event of A selling his car
to B the same as that of B buying A’s car, or are they distinct?
It is not easy to answer these questions. In fact, the more we look for answers, the less likely it
comes to appear that genuine, non-stipulative answers will ever be found. They won’t be
found because our pretheoretical conception of what events are is fundamentally
underdetermined. In our daily commerce with events this underdeterminateness does not pose
too much of a problem. It becomes clearly noticeable only when we start asking the general
questions a linguist or philosopher is bound to ask, but which rarely disturb the average
citizen.
In the eyes of some, the indeterminacy of our event concept disqualifies it from use in
philosophical or semantical analysis. To be legitimate in such analytical contexts a concept
should support genuine, non-stipulative answers to questions like those we asked above; if it
does not support such answers, then it should be replaced by a concept of our own making, for
which these questions can be answered simply because we have decided to answer them this
way or that.
There is much to be said for conceptual rigour. Indeed, within philosophy the demand for it
has been all to the good. But in natural language semantics the situation is, we think,
somewhat different. One of the central tasks of semantics is to articulate the conceptual
structures that guide and support our, human, understanding of the languages we use. If that
understanding crucially involves concepts which are to some degree underdetermined, then
the semanticist has the task of spelling out precisely how and to what extent the concept is
underdetermined; it will not do to substitute a fully determinate concept of one’s own
conception for the underdetermined notion that is in actual use.
Vraag 1
Kamp en Reyle geloven niet in een semantiek van tijd en aspect die gebaseerd is op points.
Leg kort het argument uit dat ze hiervoor aanvoeren.
Vraag 2
Kamp en Reyle roepen een heleboel vragen op bij hun event-analyse. Leg kort uit waarom ze
deze naast zich neer leggen.
Fragment 2 (p.506-509)
Davidson proposed his analysis as analysis for ‘action sentences’. But what is an action?
Surely buttering a slice of toast and writing a letter qualify. But what about something
involuntary like sneezing, or something that does not involve any sentient creature at all, such
as the eruption of a volcano or the melting of an ice cube? No matter. All these are, by
anyone’s reckoning, events. And all available evidence suggests that the sentences we
typically use to report such events – Mary sneezed, The volcano erupted; The ice cub
melted – should be given the same analysis as indubitable action-sentences like Mary
buttered the toast. So we assume that what Davidson proposed for action-sentences applies
to event-sentences generally.
But which sentences are event-sentences? Here we find that the road towards a clear answer is
once again impeded by the indeterminacy of our (pretheoretical) concept of what an event
is.[…]
Insofar as we understand the distinction between events and states it seems to come to
something like this. Events involve some kind of change, whereas states do not: that a state
obtains over some interval i means that some condition remains in force for the duration of i.
The occurrence of an event, in contrast, seems to imply that some condition, which obtains
when the event begins, in terminated by the event and gets replaced by another, ‘opposite’
condition.
Putting things this way is no more than a hint at where a clearer distinction between events
and states might be found – the actual search is still to be carried out. But it nevertheless
brings out one aspect of the distinction which is crucial for the theory of tense and aspect.
States differ from events, we said, in that states involve the continuation of some condition
whereas events involve its abrogation (=afschaffing). But a condition is something conceptual,
something that has as much to do with the way in which we choose to see reality as with
reality itself. So we should not be surprised to find that the same bit of reality can be
conceptualized either as event- or state-like, depending on how we look at it. This conceptual
dimension to the distinction between events and states is reflected by the way we speak.
Compare the sentences:
(5.35) (i)
(ii)
Mary wrote a letter.
Mary was writing a letter.
These sentences can be used to describe the same actual situation (of Mary sitting at her desk
and writing). But they describe this situation from different points of view. (5.35.i) presents it
as a completed totality – as the process which leads from the state of their being no letter to
that in which the letter has been written. (5.35.ii) seems to view the situation ‘from the inside’
– to describe it as something that is going on. From this internal perspective things are not
changing just then – Mary was already writing and she continues to do so. So in a sense the
sentence may be seen as describing a state, the state that lasts while she is writing the letter.
[…] [T]hese differences between states and events notwithstanding, there is much that eventsentences and state-sentences have in common. It seems natural therefore to try and analyse
event-sentences and state-sentences as expressing essentially the same semantic structures,
and this is what we will do. Thus we will analyse state-describing sentences as just that – i.e.
as sentences describing states – in much the same way in which we will treat event-sentences
as descriptions of events.
Having made the decision to analyse state-sentences and event-sentences in these closely
parallel ways, we might hope to by-pass the irksome questions how events and states differ
and how event- and state-sentences can be held apart. Why not see events and states as
subcategories of one overarching category – of eventualities, to use a term that is now widely
accepted. Both state-describing and event-describing sentences would then be analysed as
describing some eventuality, the temporal location of which is indicated by the tense of the
verb as well as, perhaps by other devices of temporal reference such as temporal adverbs.
That the eventuality is sometimes an event and in other cases a state might be of no further
consequence.
But this is not quite the way things are. As it turns out, the difference between state-describing
and event-describing sentences does matter. The difference matters insofar as it correlates
with distinct semantic behaviour: state-describing sentences tend to connect with the
discourse of which they are part in a way other than sentences which describe events.
Vraag 3
Kamp & Reyle onderscheiden hier slechts twee aspectuele klassen. Welke?
Vraag 4
Wat is Kamp & Reyles intuïtie over het verschil tussen de twee aspectuele klassen?
Vraag 5
Hoe zou je – binnen de vier Vendleriaanse klassen – to be writing a letter classificeren? Is dit
verschillend van de indeling die Kamp & Reyle voorstellen?
Vraag 6
Verbaast het je vanuit deze optiek dat Kamp & Reyle activities als een soort events ‘in
wording’ beschouwen (zie fragment 3)?
Fragment 3 (p.564)
A verb like walk can introduce a new event provided it is accompanied by a suitable
complementary phrase. In fact, activity verbs allow for a variety of complements which have
this effect. For instance, walk can be complemented as in (5.122.i) or in (5.122.ii).
(5.122)
(i)
(ii)
Yesterday morning Mary walked to the beach.
Yesterday morning Mary walked for two hours.
In either case an end point is imposed, in (5.122.i) as the goal of the walk, in (5.122.ii) as the
point of time two hours after the activity began. Both (5.122.i) and (5.122.ii) are fine without
special contextual support.
These facts suggest the following assessment of activity verbs. Like the episodes described by
stative verbs, those described by uncomplemented activity verbs lack a natural culmination
point. But stative verbs and activity verbs differ from each other in that activity verbs are
incomplete in a sense in which stative verbs are not: the simple non-progressive forms of
activity verbs describe (or perhaps we should say, ‘try to describe’) episodes that consist of a
period leading up to some point which terminates the episode. But the activity verb is unable
to provide such a bound by itself. So unless a bound is supplied by something other than the
verb (by a constituent of the sentence or alternatively by the context in which the sentence
appears) the verb won’t describe what it is committed to, and thus defeats, as it were, its own
purpose.
Fragment 4 (p.562-566)
The natural conclusion of the event, or culmination point, as it is often called, is followed by a
period of which one can say: Mary has written the letter. And it is preceded by a period –
that period covered by the event of writing which leads up to the culmination point, but does
not include it – during which it is possible to say: Mary is writing the letter. (5.104) gives a
schematic picture of the situation as we have described it.
(5.104)
preparatory phase
I
culmination point
II
result state
III
[…] Accomplishment verbs, achievement verbs and activity verbs share the schema (5.104);
they differ with regard to the part(s) of this schema that are available as denotations for
sentences in the simple past. For accomplishment verbs and achievement verbs these are, we
saw, part I+II and part II respectively. For activity verbs the denotations are, as they are for
the accomplishment verbs, I+II. But since activity verbs do not provide part II themselves,
this part has to be supplied externally. If it is not, then the non-progressive use of the verb is
infelicitous.
[…] If there is no culmination point, then there is no intrinsic separation of two distinct
periods. Consequently, the schema representing stative verbs is an extremely simple one. It
consists of a single stretch, comparable to the part I (or III) of (5.104).
Semantic Effect of the Progressive:
The eventualities described by progressive forms of a verb v are of the type which is
represented by that part of the schema corresponding to the Aktionsart of v which terminates
in, but does not include, the culmination point.
[…]
Semantic Effect of the Perfect:
The eventualities described by the perfect of a verb v are of the type which is represented by
that part of the schema corresponding to the Aktionsart of v which starts at, but does not
include the culmination point.