Interval Semantics for Some Event Expressions

Abstract

In earlier chapters of this book a major issue has been the question of whether adverbs should be treated as predicate modifiers or as predicates of events. One way of reconciling the difference between these approaches was presented in chapter one, where predicates of events were exhibited as themselves predicate modifiers. However there is a sense in which this is only a spurious version of the modifer view, and in chapters two and four interval semantics is used in the study of spatio-temporal modifiers, without treating events as primitive entities requiring an extra argument place in the verb. When I speak of the ‘predicate-modifier’ view of adverbial modification it is the approach of chapters two and four that I have in mind, not the approach of chapter one. But even if we restrict attention to spatio-temporal modifiers only, there is an obvious question which must be faced. It is this. Whether or not we want to treat adverbs as predicate modifiers or as event predicates there are certainly event words in our language and event phrases which receive adjectival modification in a way which has an intimate connection with the predicates which receive adverbial modification.