The Semantic Representation of Causation and Agentivity

In accounting for causativity and related constructions, it was popular at first to avoid appealing to events and event structure. But internal problems with this conservative approach motivate the introduction of eventualities into the semantic apparatus. Terence Parsons gets the credit for seeing this. His ideas can serve as the basis of a theory that begins to do justice to how causal notions are incorporated in natural language morphology. But work remains to be done in refining Parsons’ logical primitives, in relating the semantic picture to work in the metaphysics of causation, and in developing the causal picture in relation to other ideas about eventualities, such as the work discussed in this volume.