Variable polyadicity without events: a type-theoretic analysis of event semantics

Abstract Davidsonian event semantics (Davidson 1967) is widely accepted as a powerful framework for formal semantics. It has brought about many benefits in semantic construction, which may be summarised into two categories: one is to provide a satisfactory solution to a seemingly intractable problem of variable polyadicity, and the other consists of those benefits that come from the availability of the entities called events that correspond to verb actions. This paper provides an analysis of event semantics from a general viewpoint of dependent type theory. First, it is shown that the problem of variable polyadicity can be solved by means of dependent typing, without the employment of events. To do this, we only extend the simple type theory with two type constructors and the resulting semantic definitions not only allow variable polyadicity as desired but also obtain logical inferences as expected. We shall discuss why the solution is natural from a type-theoretical point of view (as compared with that in set theory). We then discuss that most (if not all) of the other benefits of event semantics may already be obtained by alternative means without introducing events as ontological entities. To this end, we consider the evidence for event semantics discussed by Parsons (1990), focusing on two particular aspects: event talks and perception words, showing that the former is mostly concerned with timing, and the latter can be dealt with a special case without introducing events in general.