Events and States

Hidden event arguments, as introduced by Davidson (1967), have proven to be of significant benefit in explaining numerous combinatorial and inferential properties of natural language expressions, such that they show up virtually everywhere in present-day assumptions about linguistic structure. The chapter reviews current assumptions concerning the ontological properties of events and states and evaluates different approaches to a narrow or broad understanding of Davidsonian eventualities. A closer look into a variety of stative expressions reveals substantial differences with respect to a series of linguistic diagnostics that point towards deeper ontological differences. Acknowledging these differences leads to a differentiation of the cover notion of states into three separate ontological categories: D-states, K-states, and tropes. Once these three stative categories are disentangled and receive their proper place in the ontological universe, this not only allows the observed linguistic behavior to be accounted for, but it also sharpens our understanding of Davidsonian eventualities.