This extended investigation of the semantics of event (and state) sentences in their various forms is a major contribution to the semantics of natural language, simultaneously encompassing important issues in linguistics, philosophy, and logic. It develops the view that the logical forms of simple English sentences typically contain quantification over events or states and shows how this view can account for a wide variety of semantic phenomena. Focusing on the structure of meaning in English sentences at a (...) &"subatomic&" level&-that is, a level below the one most theories accept as basic or &"atomic&"&-Parsons asserts that the semantics of simple English sentences require logical forms somewhat more complex than is normally assumed in natural language semantics. His articulation of underlying event theory explains a wide variety of apparently diverse semantic characteristics of natural language, and his development of the theory shows the importance of seeing the distinction between events and states. Parsons demonstrates that verbs, also, indicate kinds of actions rather than specific, individual actions. Verb phrases, too, he argues, depend on modifiers to make their function and meaning in a sentence specific. An appendix gives many of the details needed to formalize the theory discussed in the body of the text and provides a series of templates that permit the generation of atomic formulas of English. (shrink)

Davidsonian event semantics is often taken to form an unhappy marriage with compositional semantics. For example, it has been claimed to be problematic for semantic accounts of quantification Proceedings of the 16th Amsterdam Colloquium, 2007), for classical accounts of negation Semantics and contextual expression, 1989), and for intersective accounts of verbal coordination. This paper shows that none of this is the case, once we abandon the idea that the event variable is bound at sentence level, and assume (...) instead that verbs denote existential quantifiers over events. Quantificational arguments can then be given a semantic account, negation can be treated classically, and coordination can be modeled as intersection. The framework presented here is a natural choice for researchers and fieldworkers who wish to sketch a semantic analysis of a language without being forced to make commitments about the hierarchical order of arguments, the argument-adjunct distinction, the default scope of quantifiers, or the nature of negation and coordination. (shrink)

The notion of existence is a very puzzling one philosophically. Often philosophers have appealed to linguistic properties of sentences stating existence. However, the appeal to linguistic intuitions has generally not been systematic and without serious regard of relevant issues in linguistic semantics. This paper has two aims. On the one hand, it will look at statements of existence from a systematic linguistic point of view, in order to try to clarify what the actual semantics of such statements in (...) fact is. On the other hand, it will explore what sort of ontology such statements reflect. The first aim is one of linguistic semantics; the second aim is one of descriptive metaphysics. Philosophically, existence statements appear to reflect the distinction between endurance and perdurance as well as particular notions of abstract states and of kinds. Linguistically, statements of existence involve a particular way of drawing the distinction between eventive and stative verbs and between individual-level and stage-level predicates as well as a particular approach to the semantics of bare plurals and mass nouns. (shrink)

Approaches to anaphora generally seek to explain the potential for a DP to covary with a pronoun in terms of a combination of factors, such as the inherent semantics of the antecedent DP, its scope properties, and its structural position. A case in point is Reinhart’s classic condition on bound anaphora, paraphrasable as A DP can antecede a pronoun pro only if the DP c-commands pro at S-structure, supplemented with some extra machinery to allow indefinites to covary with pronouns (...) beyond their c-command domains. In the present paper, I explore a different take. I propose that anaphora is governed not by DPs and their properties; it is governed by predicates and their properties. To use a metaphor from dynamic semantics: discourse referents can only be ‘activated’ by predicates, never by DPs. This conceptually simple assumption is shown to have far-reaching consequences. For one, it yields a new take on weak crossover, arguably worthy of consideration. Moreover, it leads to a further general “restatement of the anaphora question”, in Reinhart’s words. (shrink)

The idea that an adequate semantics of ordinary language calls for some theory of events has sparked considerable debate among linguists and philosophers. On the one hand, so many linguistic phenomena appear to be explained if (and, according to some authors, only if) we make room for logical forms in which reference to or quantification over events is explicitly featured. Examples include nominalization, adverbial modification, tense and aspect, plurals, and singular causal statements. On the other hand, a (...) number of deep philosophical questions arise as soon as we take events into consideration. Are events entities of a kind? What are their identity and individuation criteria? How does semantic theorizing depend on such metaphysical issues? The aim of this book is to address such issues in some depth, with emphasis precisely on the interplay between linguistic applications and philosophical implications. Contributors: N. Asher, P. M. Bertinetto, J. Brandl, D. Delfitto, R. Eckardt, J. Higginbotham, A. Lenci, T. Parsons, A. ter Meulen, H. Verkuyl. A comprehensive introductory essay (pp. 3-47) is included. (shrink)

A theory of nominalization should specify the relation between noun meaning and verb meaning. At least for some classes of nouns, such a theory should also provide a general and systematic way of deriving noun meanings from verb meanings. This is the case, for example, for event-denoting $ing\sb{\rm of}$-Nouns. The meaning of these nouns must be derived by a rule from the meaning of the corresponding verb, since there is evidence that they are not listed in the lexicon. ;A theory (...) of nominalization should also account for the meaning differences and the distributional differences among various kinds of nominals and that-clauses. Following Zeno Vendler, I argue that some of these differences are accounted for by the distinction between propositional entities and event-like entities, and by the semantic selection properties of predicates. ;I propose a semantics for English nominalization based on Kratzer's semantics of situations. The central notion of this semantics is the part of-relation among possible situations. This theory provides a general way of recovering the meaning of event-nouns from the meaning of the corresponding verb. Moreover, it is able to account for the distributional and semantic differences among different kinds of nominals and that-clauses. ;A compositional approach to the semantics of NPs raises the issue of the argument structure of nouns. I discuss different accounts of the role of the of-phrase and of the by-phrase with event-nouns. I provide some evidence that they have argument status. Italian infinitival NPs provide some cross-linguistic evidence for this conclusion. The semantics for English nominalization I develop serves also as a tool for investigating the difference of interpretation derived NPs show in different contexts. I address the issue of why these NPs are paraphrasable by that-clauses in some context, but not in others. (shrink)

The present volume collects novel approaches to two classical topics within verbal semantics, namely argument structure and the treatment of time and aspect.

Experimental data suggest that the division between the visual ventral and dorsal pathways may indeed indicate that static and dynamical information is processed separately. Contrary to Hurford, it is suggested that the ventral pathway primarily generates representations of objects, whereas the dorsal pathway produces representations of events. The semantic object/event distinction may relate to the morpho-syntactic noun/verb distinction.

This paper defends a novel view of ‘what it is like’-sentences, according to which they attribute certain sorts of relations—I call them ‘affective relations’—that hold between events and individuals. The paper argues in detail for the superiority of this proposal over other views that are prevalent in the literature. The paper further argues that the proposal makes better sense than the alternatives of the widespread use of Nagel’s definition of conscious states and that it also shows the mistakes in (...) two prominent suggestions about the definition when properly understood: first, that it is empty and uninformative, and second, that it leads directly to a substantial claim in the theory of consciousness, namely that an individual is in a conscious state only if the individual is aware of their being in that state. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a decompositional analysis of three kinds of plural indefinites in two related languages, European Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. The three indefinites studied are bare plurals, the unos (Spanish)/uns (Portuguese) type, and the algunos (Spanish)/alguns (Portuguese) type. The paper concentrates on four properties: semantic plurality, positive polarity, partitivity, and event distribution. The logic underlying the analysis is that of compositionality, applied at the subword level: as items become bigger in form (with the addition of morphemes), they (...) also acquire more semantic properties. The paper proposes the “indefinite hierarchy", which establishes a set of components for languages to build their indefinites with, in a particular order. (shrink)

Semantics traditionally focuses on linguistic meaning. In recent years, the Super Linguistics movement has tried to broaden the scope of inquiry in various directions, including an extension of semantics to talk about the meaning of pictures. There are close similarities between the interpretation of language and of pictures. Most fundamentally, pictures, like utterances, can be either true or false of a given state of affairs, and hence both express propositions (Zimmermann, 2016; Greenberg, 2013; Abusch, 2015). Moreover, sequences of (...) pictures, like sequences of utterances, can be used to tell stories. Wordless picture books, comics, and film are cases in point. In this paper I pick up the project of providing a dynamic semantic account of pictorial story-telling, started by Abusch (2012) and continued by Abusch & Rooth (2017); Maier & Bimpikou (2019); Fernando (2020). More specifically, I propose here a semantics of speech and thought bubbles by adding event reference to PicDRT. To get there I first review the projection-based semantics for pictures (section 1), noting the fundamental distinction between symbolic and iconic meaning that makes speech bubbles especially interesting (section 2). I then review the dynamic PicDRT framework for pictorial narratives (section 3), add events (section 4), and propose an account of speech bubbles as quotational event modification (section 5). I end with a brief look at other conventional, symbolic enrichments in comics (section 6). (shrink)

This paper demonstrates that the progressive interpretation in Ga is an effect of the interaction between the imperfective aspect and a definite description of events. Crucially, the data from Ga point to the consequences of the view that definite descriptions of events encode the familiarity of the discourse referent and its uniqueness in bearing the property in question. Namely, they yield direct evidentiality and the necessary ongoingness of the event at the topic time. Thus, the paper identifies previously (...) unattested variation in the semantics of the progressive in a cross-linguistic perspective and shows that not only lexical but also grammatical aspect exhibits striking parallelisms with the nominal domain. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates that the progressive interpretation in Ga is an effect of the interaction between the imperfective aspect and a definite description of events. Crucially, the data from Ga point to the consequences of the view that definite descriptions of events encode the familiarity of the discourse referent and its uniqueness in bearing the property in question. Namely, they yield direct evidentiality and the necessary ongoingness of the event at the topic time. Thus, the paper identifies previously (...) unattested variation in the semantics of the progressive in a cross-linguistic perspective and shows that not only lexical but also grammatical aspect exhibits striking parallelisms with the nominal domain. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates that the progressive interpretation in Ga is an effect of the interaction between the imperfective aspect and a definite description of events. Crucially, the data from Ga point to the consequences of the view that definite descriptions of events encode the familiarity of the discourse referent and its uniqueness in bearing the property in question. Namely, they yield direct evidentiality and the necessary ongoingness of the event at the topic time. Thus, the paper identifies previously (...) unattested variation in the semantics of the progressive in a cross-linguistic perspective and shows that not only lexical but also grammatical aspect exhibits striking parallelisms with the nominal domain. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates that the progressive interpretation in Ga is an effect of the interaction between the imperfective aspect and a definite description of events. Crucially, the data from Ga point to the consequences of the view that definite descriptions of events encode the familiarity of the discourse referent and its uniqueness in bearing the property in question. Namely, they yield direct evidentiality and the necessary ongoingness of the event at the topic time. Thus, the paper identifies previously (...) unattested variation in the semantics of the progressive in a cross-linguistic perspective and shows that not only lexical but also grammatical aspect exhibits striking parallelisms with the nominal domain. (shrink)

This book pursues the question of how and whether natural language allows for reference to abstract objects in a fully systematic way. By making full use of contemporary linguistic semantics, it presents a much greater range of linguistic generalizations than has previously been taken into consideration in philosophical discussions, and it argues for an ontological picture is very different from that generally taken for granted by philosophers and semanticists alike. Reference to abstract objects such as properties, numbers, propositions, and (...) degrees is considerably more marginal than generally held. (shrink)

As common expressions in natural language, sentences with tense and aspect play a very important role. There are many ways to encode their contributions to meaning, but I believe their function is best understood as exhibiting relations among related eventualities (events and states). Accordingly, contra other efforts to explain tense and aspect by appeal to temporal logics or interval logics, I believe the most basic and correct way to explain tense and aspect is to articulate these relations between eventualities. (...) Building on these ideas, I will characterize a formal semantics – Event-State Semantics (ESS) – which differs from all formal semantics based on temporal logics; in particular, one with which sentences with tense and aspect can be adequately explained, including molecular sentences and those with adverbial clauses. (shrink)

Chapter 1 Introduction How are participants associated with the eventualities they participate in? Are there events? Thematic roles? ...

ERPs (event-related potentials) correlates are largely used in cognitive psychology and specifically for analysis of semantic information processing. Previous research has underlined a strong correlation between a negative-ongoing wave (N400), more frontally distributed, and semantic linguistic or extra-linguistic anomalies. With reference to the extra-linguistic domain, our experiment analyzed ERP variation in a semantic task of comprehension of emotional facial expressions. The experiment explored the effect of expectancy violation when subjects observed congruous or incongruous emotional facial patterns. Four prototypical (anger, sadness, (...) happiness and surprise) and four morphed faces were presented. Moreover, two distinct cognitive tasks (an implicit vs an explicit elaboration) were analyzed in order to evaluate the influence of spontaneous decoding in N400-like effects. An automatic, high-order cognitive process was found, elicited by a negative ERP variation similar to the linguistic N400 effect, which allows us to explain the congruous/incongruous decoding in semantic extra-linguistic comprehension. (shrink)

The present paper deals with the semantics of locative expressions. Our approach is essentially model-theoretic, using basic geometrical properties of the space-time continuum. We shall demonstrate that locatives consist of two layers: the first layer defines a location and the second a type of movement with respect to that location. The elements defining these layers, called localisersand modalisers, tend to form a unit, which is typically either an adposition or a case marker. It will be seen that this layering (...) is not only semantically but in many languages also morphologically manifest. There are numerous languages in which the morphology is sufficiently transparent with respect to the layering. The consequences of this theory are manifold. For example, we shall show that it explains the contrast between English and Finnish concerning directionals, which is discussed in Fong (1997). In addition, we shall be concerned with the question of orientation of locatives, as discussed in Nam (1995). We propose that nondirectional locatives are oriented to the event, while directional locatives are oriented to certain arguments, called movers. (shrink)

An investigation into the behavior of sentence-final then suggests the need to distinguish between two uses:As a temporal anaphor referring back to a previously established explicit temporal referent (ETR).As a way of expressing relations between states/events, where no ETR is required.A means of making this distinction in Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) (Kamp and Reyle (forthcoming)) is proposed. This involves restricting the introduction of temporal referents into the universe of discourse to cases where certain types of temporal adverbials are present. (...) In other cases, event or state referents but not temporal referents may be introduced. This contrasts with previous DRT accounts of temporal phenomena, which employ no such distinction. (shrink)

Recent Neo-Davidsonian accounts of the semantics of progressive constructions of action verbs reflect an ontological distinction between processes or incomplete events on the one hand, and complete events on the other. This paper has two goals. First, it attempts to show that this putative ontological distinction is beset with problems. The second goal of this paper is to offer the beginnings of a positive proposal that seeks to show how the ontologically austere Davidsonian can account for the (...) truth conditions of progressive constructions without the need for an enriched ontology. (shrink)

This paper presents a detailed contrastive frame semantic analysis of arriving events in English and Spanish, attested through a corpus study. The framework and methodology of our research follows the FrameNet II Research Project housed at ICSI. First, we present a formal description of the Arriving frame as a subframe of the Motion frame: arriving encodes a basic subpart of our conceptualization of motion, namely the transition from moving to arriving at a goal. Second, we carry out a cross-linguistic (...) analysis of this frame, based on a corpus study of English and Spanish arriving predicates. A first assumption would suggest that these two languages share a basic abstract frame description for arriving events. While acknowledging this, we yet show that at a lexical level the particular lexicalization patterns of each language influence the way speakers bring onto stage the different participants of the scene. We discuss this issue through a study of implicit frame elements, conflation and incorporation patterns, profiling, and deixis. Third, we briefly introduce the question of polysemy for those predicates that participate in the arriving frame. Arguably, the spatial meaning of arriving is the core sense from which a set of sense extensions derives, pointing to a wide range of independent frames (e.g. Cognition frame, Achievement frame, etc.) This fact can be attested in both languages in a parallel way. The different senses can be described synchronically in terms of frame semantics, while motivation for them is to be found in the cognitive processes of Metaphor (across frames), and Fictive Motion (within frame). (shrink)

According to the resemblance account of 'what it's like' and similar constructions, a sentence such as 'there is something it’s like to have a toothache' means 'there is something having a toothache resembles'. This account has proved controversial in the literature; some writers endorse it, many reject it. We show that this conflict is illusory. Drawing on the semantics of intensional transitive verbs, we show that there are two versions of the resemblance account, depending on whether 'resembles' is construed (...) notionally or relationally. While well-known criticisms of the resemblance account undermine its relational version, they do not touch its notional version. On the contrary, the notional version is equivalent to various accounts usually interpreted as rivals to resemblance. We end by noting that this resolution of the controversy (a) explains why 'like', which is a comparative, appears in a construction that concerns the properties of events, and (b) removes any pressure to suppose that 'like' is ambiguous between a comparative and a non-comparative sense. (shrink)

This paper explores the hypothesis that all comparative sentences— nominal, verbal, and adjectival—contain instances of a single morpheme that compositionally introduces degrees. This morpheme, sometimes pronounced much, semantically contributes a structure-preserving map from entities, events, or states, to their measures along various dimensions. A major goal of the paper is to argue that the differences in dimensionality observed across domains are a consequence of what is measured, as opposed to which expression introduces the measurement. The resulting theory has a (...) number of interesting properties. It characterizes the notion of ‘measurement’ uniformly across comparative constructions, in terms of non-trivial structure preservation. It unifies the distinctions between mass/count nouns and atelic/telic verb phrases with that between gradable and non-gradable adjectives. Finally, it affords a uniform characterization of semantically anomalous comparisons across categories. (shrink)

The study of the temporal structure of events in natural language is of prime importance in linguistics. Though there has been recent progress on formal theories of events, these theories do not address certain syntactic and semantic properties peculiar to languages such as Hindi. This paper concentrates on properties related to perfectivity. It motivates a small number of semantic features for events and their objects, such as whether an object exists independently of an event, whether it is (...) totally affected by the event, and so on. It then formalizes these features. It also shows how they can be formalized in an algebraic framework and applied in a categorial grammar to derive the properties of verbal and nominal predicates. The result is an integration of descriptive semantics with algebraic theories of objects and events. (shrink)

The article reviews some analyses of temporal language in logical approaches to natural language semantics. It considers some asymmetries between past and future, manifested in language, which motivate the “standard view” of the non-reversibility of time and the persistence of the past. It concludes with a puzzle about the changing past which challenges the standard view.

‘The proper treatment of events’ is the title of a recent book [LH04] by M. van Lambalgen and F. Hamm, applying the event calculus from [Sha97] to natural language semantics. Some basic ideas behind that treatment are presented in a technically different form below, shaped by a concrete formulation of events as strings of sets of fluents ([Fer04]). These strings can be read as comic strips that are (I think) easy to grasp and work with, providing a (...) friendly (if not altogether proper) approach to events. (shrink)

It is argued that current solutions to the question of how to individuate events do not work. Jonathan Bennett's thesis that the indeterminacy here is only semantic, not ontological, is refuted. An alternative account of why events resemble facts (although their identity criteria are less fine-grained) is defended.

This paper investigates the semantics of derived statives, deverbal adjectives that fail to entail there to have been a preceding (temporal) event of the kind named by the verb they are derived from, e.g. darkened in a darkened portion of skin. Building on Gawron’s (The lexical semantics of extent verbs, San Diego State University, ms, 2009) recent observations regarding the semantics of extent uses of change of state verbs (e.g., Kim’s skin darkens between the knee and the (...) calf) and Kennedy and Levin’s (Adjectives and adverbs: syntax, semantics and disclosure, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008) theory of change, it is shown, contrary to previous analyses, that a fully compositional semantic analysis is possible, and thus that there is no argument from derived statives for word formation differing from semantic composition above the word level in requiring deletion operations, as in Dubinsky and Simango’s (Language 72:749–781, 1996) analysis. Further, such an analysis, by contrast with previous ones, both compositional (Jackson in Resultatives, derived statives, lexical semantic structure, Doctoral dissertation, UCLA, 2005b; Condoravdi and Deo in Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL 18), Seoul, 2008 and non-compositional (Dubinsky and Simango 1996), correctly predicts, as shown by a range of arguments, that the meaning of the derived stative contains the meaning of the verb it is derived from and that it therefore contrasts fundamentally with morphologically simple adjectives in the kind of meaning that it has. (shrink)

Modernity in the late eighteenth century transformed all domains of European life -intellectual, industrial, and social. Not least affected was the experience of time itself: ever-accelerating change left people with briefer intervals of time in which to gather new experiences and adapt. In this provocative and erudite book Reinhart Koselleck, a distinguished philosopher of history, explores the concept of historical time by posing the question: what kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity? Relying on an extraordinary (...) array of witnesses and texts from politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets to Renaissance paintings and the dreams of German citizens during the Third Reich, Koselleck shows that, with the advent of modernity, the past and the future became 'relocated' in relation to each other.The promises of modernity -freedom, progress, infinite human improvement -produced a world accelerating toward an unknown and unknowable future within which awaited the possibility of achieving utopian fulfillment. History, Koselleck asserts, emerged in this crucial moment as a new temporality providing distinctly new ways of assimilating experience. In the present context of globalization and its resulting crises, the modern world once again faces a crisis in aligning the experience of past and present. To realize that each present was once an imagined future may help us once again place ourselves within a temporality organized by human thought and humane ends as much as by the contingencies of uncontrolled events. (shrink)

Several debates in contemporary metaphysics provoke us to ask what an event is. One theory, Pioneered by chisholm, Develops the analogy between the occurrence of events and the truth of corresponding propositions. I call these propositional analyses. It is unclear whether their adherents wish to jettison our event-Concepts, And replace them with concepts from another category, Such as semantics. The other theory of what events are that I scrutinize, Namely kim's and goldman's property-Exemplification analysis, Seems reductive. My (...) suspicion is that if you attempt to boil down the occurrence of an event to the "obtaining" or "taking place" of a proposition-Like "state of affairs"--Or to the "exemplification" of a property by an "object"--At some "time", We have a residual event: a mysterious episode of "obtaining" or "exemplifying" in which either states of affairs or properties and objects participate. Reduction is unlikely. (shrink)

Description Logics (DLs) are a family of formal knowledge representation formalisms and the most well-known formalisms in semantics-based systems. The central focus of this research is on logical-terminological characterisation/analysis of possibilistic and probabilistic descriptions of events in DLs. Based on a logical characterisation of the concept of `being', this paper conceptualises events within DLs world descriptions. Accordingly, it deals with the concepts of `possibility of events' and `probability of events'. The main goal of this research (...) is to investigate how possible and probable notations can, terminologically and logically, be interpreted and analysed within DLs world descriptions. In other words, the research logically-terminologically investigates how possibilistic and probabilistic descriptions of events can be expressed in DLs. (shrink)

The overwhelming majority of the attempts in exploring the problems related to quantum logical structures and their interpretation have been based on an underlying set-theoretic syntactic language. We propose a transition in the involved syntactic language to tackle these problems from the set-theoretic to the category-theoretic mode, together with a study of the consequent semantic transition in the logical interpretation of quantum event structures. In the present work, this is realized by representing categorically the global structure of a quantum algebra (...) of events (or propositions) in terms of sheaves of local Boolean frames forming Boolean localization functors. The category of sheaves is a topos providing the possibility of applying the powerful logical classification methodology of topos theory with reference to the quantum world. In particular, we show that the topos-theoretic representation scheme of quantum event algebras by means of Boolean localization functors incorporates an object of truth values, which constitutes the appropriate tool for the definition of quantum truth-value assignments to propositions describing the behavior of quantum systems. Effectively, this scheme induces a revised realist account of truth in the quantum domain of discourse. We also include an Appendix, where we compare our topos-theoretic representation scheme of quantum event algebras with other categorial and topos-theoretic approaches. (shrink)

Structuring Sense explores the difference between words however defined and structures however constructed. It sets out to demonstrate over three volumes, of which this is the second, that the explanation of linguistic competence should be shifted from lexical entry to syntactic structure, from memory of words to manipulation of rules. Its reformulation of how grammar and lexicon interact has profound implications for linguistic, philosophical, and psychological theories about human mind and language. Hagit Borer departs from both language specific constructional approaches (...) and lexicalist approaches to argue that universal hierarchical structures determine interpretation, and that language variation emerges from the morphological and phonological properties of inflectional material. The Normal Course of Events applies this radical approach to event structure. Integrating research results in syntax, semantics, and morphology, the author shows that argument structure is based on the syntactic realization of semantic event units. The topics she addresses include the structure of internal arguments and of telic and atelic interpretations, accusative and partitive case, perfective and imperfective marking, the unaccusative-unergative distinction, existential interpretation and post-verbal subjects, and resultative constructions. The languages discussed include English, Catalan, Finnish, Hebrew, Czech, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. (shrink)

This dissertation provides a model-theoretic semantics for English sentences atttributing a property or action to a group of objects, either collectively or distributively. It is shown that certain adverbial expressions select for collective predicates; therefore collective and distibutive predicates must be distinguishable. This finding is problematic for recent accounts of distributive predicates which analyze such predicates as taking group-level arguments, and hence as not distinguishable from collective predicates. ;A group-level treatment of distributives is possible, however, if predicate denotations are (...) relativized to a set of events for which a part/whole relation is defined. An event in which a group performs an action distributively will have subevents in which each of the group's members perform the same action; an event in which the group performs the action collectively will not. ;This analysis also makes possible an account of the fact that adverbials expressing collective action commonly have an additional use expressing spatial proximity, both in English and cross-linguistically. . A spatial "trace" function on the set of events allows formal definitions for the spatial uses of such adverbials to exactly parallel the definitions for the collectivizing uses. ;The dissertation also provides arguments for a set-theoretic model for plurality, in which the group membership relation is distinct from the subgroup relation. ;Certain quantifiers are shown sensitive to distinction between different sorts of group-level event. To accommodate this fact, it is suggested that verbal denotations provide, for each event, both an "inclusion set" and an "exclusion set"--corresponding roughly to positive and negative denotations. If the inclusion and exclusion sets are allowed under certain circumstances not to complement each other, correct results obtain. ;The splitting of verbal denotations into inclusion and exclusion sets also allows the solution of certain problems in previous accounts of the semantics of subject-verb agreement for number. The dissertation closes with a defense of the hypothesis that agreement is conditioned primarily by the semantics. (shrink)