Events and argument structure

Tracing the logical form tradition in event semantics from Davidson through Schein and Schwarzschild reveals an architecture of striking structural depth: every participant inhabits its own event layer, reference to individuals drops out entirely, and a recurring monadic, conjunctive format is forced by the compositional system itself á la Pietroski. Independent evidence from psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and event cognition converges on structurally similar conclusions. Surveying the cognitive evidence reveals a striking dissociation: evidence for prelinguistic, polyadic event concepts, in contrast to the massively monadic expressions described by the event semantics surveyed here. I argue that such a dissociation can be explained by a two-level cognitive architecture on which stable compositional symbols provided by the language system are satisfied by rich, domain-specific conceptual content provided by extralinguistic cognitive system. Such moves may be leveraged to answer questions the field has long left open, such as the debate between absolute vs specific thematic roles. Together, these support reading the logical form tradition as specifying a formal, empirically-motivated candidate for a Language of Thought, specialized in representing what happens, who is involved, and how.

First version (submitted for review)