Events. New Work on Their Ontology and Semantics

Workshop: New Work on the Ontology and Semantics of Events

Université Côte d’Azur, Nice,

Date: 18-19 June 2024

Events (in the broad sense) play a fundamental role in our interaction with the world: actions, events, processes, states are crucial components of reality as we represent it. Research on events comprises disciplines as diverse as natural language semantics, the syntax-semantic interface, analytic metaphysics, applied ontology and conceptual modeling. 

Events have come to play a central role in natural language semantics since Davidson’s highly influential proposal, which has led to a great range of developments including, in its Neo-Davidsonian version, in the syntax-semantic interface. There are a number of challenges that have received little attention, though, such as the distinction between events and acts, events and abstract states, as well as events and situations (as truthmakers). Moreover, there are alternatives to Davidsonian events semantics that have been proposed, but ask for further developments, such as truthmaker semantics, force semantics and radical decomposition of verbs in syntax (as light verb-noun complexes). Finally, there are various interesting issues regarding events and syntactic structure, including the decomposition of event predicates in syntactic structure and the relevance of cartography for event semantics.

Recently, also the metaphysics of events have seen renewed interest. Several issues have been addressed such as that concerning nature of, and the internal structure of, processes and events, the related issue that concerns the modal profile and the essential properties of events (and whether these features differ from the ones possessed by processes), the question of whether a theory concerning these entities has a descriptive or prescriptive import, as well as the issue concerning the relations between events, dispositions, and causation, and that concerning the nature of negative events and actions.

Finally, the notion of event (in the broad sense)  is pervasive and plays a key role in applied ontology and conceptual modeling. It is a general category of the most widespread foundational ontologies such as UFO, DOLCE, and BFO. On the one hand, these ontologies recently provided insightful accounts concerning the nature of events, their part-whole structure, and their difference from, e.g., situations, states, and processes. On the other hand, the notion of events played a key role in elucidating notions such as those of prevention, risk, production, money, and many others.

This conference aims to bring together new research on events from different perspectives. 

Submission: If you want to contribute, please submit an abstract of approximately 1000 words suitable for a 30-minutes presentation that should be prepared for blind review and include a cover page with the full name, institution, and contact information. Abstracts should be sent in PDF format to: [email protected] 

Zoom link

For the scholars interested in attending the workshop online, we provide a Zoom link. Please, write to [email protected] to communicate your intention to attend it. 

Further information:

Conference Fees: 60€ regular; 40€ students/unemployed

Webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/enwos

Informal queries: [email protected]

Deadline for submission: 30 March 2024

Notification of acceptance: 15 April 2024

Woskshop Schedule

18 June

9.30 - 10.30: Claudia Maienborn, Unveiling Sortal Restrictions: New Diagnostics and Insights into the Ontology of Events and States

10.30 - 11.10: Michele Paolini Paoletti, The Relations Between and Within Events

11.10 - 11.40: Coffee break

11.40 - 12.40: Riccardo Baratella, Massy-Processes as Aristotelian Universals

12.40 - 14.00: Lunch Break

14.00 - 15.00: Nicola Guarino, Events as qualitative changes

15.00 - 15.40: Robin Timothée Bianchi, The Ontology of Action: Acts and Activities 

15.40 - 16.20: Coffee break

16.20 - 17.00: Starr Sandoval, Ontological puzzles of non-intersective adjectives and as phrases

17.00 - 18.00: Giancarlo Guizzardi, TBA

19 June

9.30 - 10.30: Friederike Moltmann, Lexical Decomposition of Verbs and the Notion of an Abstract State

10.30 - 11.30: Michal Starke, How events are born: bringing morphology, syntax and semantics together

11.30 - 12.00: Coffee break

12.00 - 12.40: Boban Arsenijević, Pinning down what it means to have the verbal category and lexical aspect

12.40 - 14.00: Lunch Break

14.00 - 14.40: Alfonso Romero-Zuniga, Are events structured wholes?

14.40 - 15.20: Anna Kulikova and Vsevolod Masliukov, In Defence of Tatevosov’s Actional Classification

15.20 - 16.00: Yunhe Zhao, When unergativity and unaccusativity shake hands: A case study on German vehicle verbs and their motion events

16.00 - 16.20: Coffee break

16.20 - 17.00: Riley Moher and Michael Grüninger, The Covert Ontology of Process Mining: Data-Driven Event Semantics

17.00 - 18.00: Ludger Jansen, Is Participation in an Event the Realization of a Disposition?

References:

R. Casati and Varzi: ‘Events’. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online)

R. Casati and A. Varzi (eds.): Events. Darthmouth Publ. Company, 1996

F. Moltmann: ‘Events in Contemporary Semantics’ (forthcoming), in M. Cassina et al. (eds): 21st-Century Philosophy of Events: Beyond the Analytic / Continental Divide. Edinburgh UP, https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007781

Truswell, R. (ed.): Oxford Handbook of Event Structure. Oxford UP, Oxford, 2019.

J. Higginbotham, F. Pianesi, A. Varzi (eds.): Speaking of Events. Oxford UP, 2000.

S. Rothstein (ed.): Events and Grammar, Kluwer, 1998

A. Williams (2021): ‘Events in Semantics’. In P. Stalmaszscuk (ed.): Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge UP.