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Abstract. Since Donald Davidson's seminal work "The Logical Form of Action Sentences" (1967) event arguments have become an integral component of virtually every semantic theory. Over the past years Davidson's proposal has been continuously extended such that nowadays event(uality) arguments are generally associated not only with action verbs but with predicates of all sorts. The reasons for such an extension are seldom explicitly justified. Most problematical in this respect is the case of stative expressions. By taking a closer look at copula sentences the present study assesses the legitimacy of stretching the Davidsonian notion of events and discusses its consequences. A careful application of some standard eventuality diagnostics (perception reports, combination with locative modifiers and manner adverbials) as well as some new diagnostics (behavior of certain degree adverbials) reveals that copular expressions do not behave as expected under a Davidsonian perspective: they fail all eventuality tests, regardless of whether they represent stage-level or individual-level predicates. In this respect, copular expressions pattern with stative verbs like know, hate, and resemble, which in turn differ sharply from state verbs like stand, sit, and sleep. The latter pass all of the eventuality tests and therefore qualify as true "Davidsonian state" expressions. On the basis of these empirical observations and taking up ideas of Kim (1969Kim ( , 1976 and Asher (1993Asher ( , 2000, an alternative account of copular expressions (and stative verbs) is provided, according to which the copula introduces a referential argument for a temporally bound property exemplification (= "Kimian state"). Considerations on some logical properties, viz. closure conditions and the latent infinite regress of eventualities, suggest that supplementing Davidsonian eventualities with Kimian states may yield not only a more adequate analysis of copula sentences but also a better understanding of eventualities in general. IntroductionSemantic research over the past three decades has provided impressive confirmation of Donald Davidson's famous claim that "there is a lot of language we can make systematic sense of if we suppose events exist" (Davidson 1980: 137). Soon after they took the linguistic stage, it became clear that event arguments were not to be understood as confined to the class of action verbs, as Davidson originally proposed, but probably had a much wider distribution. Nowadays, scholars working in what has been called the Neo-Davidsonian paradigm, following Higginbotham (1985Higginbotham ( , 2000 and Parsons (1990Parsons ( , 2000, assume that any predicate may have such a hidden argument. That is, it is not only verbs, whether eventive or stative, that are taken to introduce Davidsonian eventuality arguments 1 , but also adjectives, nouns, and prepositions. Bach's (1986) term "eventuality" as a cover term for events, processes and certain (viz. Davidsonian; see below) states. The notion "event", which is often understood in a br...

The study offers a discourse-based account of the Spanish copula forms ser and estar, which are generally considered to be lexical exponents of the stage-level/individual-level contrast. It argues against the popular view that the distinction between SLPs and ILPs rests on a fundamental cognitive division of the world that is reflected in the grammar. As it happens, conceptual oppositions like "temporary vs. permanent" or "arbitrary vs. essential" provide only a preference for the interpretation of estar and ser. In addition, the evidence for an SLP/ILP impact on the grammar turns out to be far less conclusive than is currently assumed. The study argues against event-based accounts of the ser/estar contrast in particular, showing that ser and estar pattern alike in failing all of the standard eventuality tests. The discourse-based account proposed instead assumes that ser and estar both display the same lexical semantics (which is identical to the semantics of English be, German sein, etc.); estar differs from ser only in presupposing a relation to a specific discourse situation. By using estar a speaker restricts his or her claim to a specific discourse situation, whereas by using ser, the speaker makes no such restriction. The preference for interpreting estar predications as denoting temporary properties and ser predications as denoting permanent properties follows from economy principles driving the pragmatic legitimation of estar's discourse dependence. The analysis proposed in this paper can also account for the observation that ser predications do not give rise to thetic judgements. The proposal is couched in terms of the framework of DRT.Estoy por creer que el verbo 'estar' es el anarquista más grande, que ha cruzado el Atlántico. Crespo (1946: 45)

Several studies support the psychological reality of a mental timeline that runs from the left to the right and may strongly affect our thinking about time. Ulrich and Maienborn (Cognition 117:126-138, 2010) examined the linguistic relevance of this timeline during the processing of past-and future-related sentences. Their results indicate that the timeline is not activated automatically during sentence comprehension. While no explicit reference of temporal expressions to the left-right axis has been attested (e.g., *the meeting was moved to the left), natural languages refer to the back-front axis in order to encode temporal information (e.g., the meeting was moved forward). Therefore, the present study examines whether a back-frontal timeline becomes automatically activated during the processing of past-and future-related sentences. The results demonstrate a clear effect on reaction time that emerges from a time

Abstract. Davidsonian event semantics has an impressive track record as a framework for natural language analysis. In recent years it has become popular to assume that not only action verbs but predicates of all sorts have an additional event argument. Yet, this hypothesis is not without controversy in particular wrt the particularly challenging case of statives. Maienborn (2003aMaienborn ( , 2004 argues that there is a need for distinguishing two kinds of states. While verbs such as sit, stand, sleep refer to eventualities in the sense of Davidson (= Davidsonian states), the states denoted by such stative verbs like know, weigh,and own, as well as any combination of copula plus predicate are of a different ontological type (= Kimian states). Against this background, the present study assesses the two main arguments that have been raised in favour of a Davidsonian approach for statives. These are the combination with certain manner adverbials and Parsons' (2000) so-called time travel argument. It will be argued that the manner data which, at first sight, seem to provide evidence for a Davidsonian approach to statives are better analysed as non-compositional reinterpretations triggered by the lack of a regular Davidsonian event argument. As for Parsons's time travel argument, it turns out that the original version does not supply the kind of support for the Davidsonian approach that Parsons supposed. However, properly adapted, the time travel argument may provide additional evidence for the need of reifying the denotatum of statives, as suggested by the assumption of Kimian states.