Situations and Situation-like Entities in Contemporary Ontology and Semantics

In this hybrid seminar, we will discuss conceptions of situations and similar entities (states, states of affairs, events, tropes, and facts) and their roles in the semantics of natural language. We will discuss the various semantic roles of situations and similar entities in situation-based semantic approaches (in particular truthmaker semantics) and how those roles bear on the ontology of those entities. We will particularly focus on the part-whole structure of entities, taking into account recent research on the metaphysics of relations, ontological dependence, and part-whole structure in general.

http://www.friederike-moltmann.com/teaching/situation-based-approaches-in-semantics-fall-2025/

Department of Linguistics, Université Côte d'Azur