A Type-Logical Account of Quantification in Event Semantics

Abstract

It has been argued that Davidson’s event semantics does not combine smoothly with Montague’s compositional semantics. The difficulty, which we call the event quantification problem, comes from a possibly bad interaction between event existential closure, on the one hand, and quantification, negation, or conjunction, on the other hand. The recent literature provides two solutions to this problem. The first one is due to Champollion [2, 3], and the second one to Winter and Zwarts [13]. The present paper elaborates on this second solution. In particular, it provides a treatment of quantified adverbial modifiers, which was absent from [13].