Adverbs and Events
Adverbs and Events
Davidson had a clever idea with his theory of adverbs. It seemed both intuitive and ingenious, a genuine advance. It linked language and ontology, showed the power of standard logic, and provided a model for future work. We might compare it to Russell’s theory of descriptions: a clever and convincing account of logical form. It cemented Davidson’s reputation. I remember thinking in my callow youth: That’s impressive. Russell’s theory avoids ontological extravagance in the form of Meinongian objects; Davidson’s theory avoids ontological extravagance in the form of manners of having properties. We don’t have to say that “John ran quickly” requires the existence of manners of running in addition to John and the property of running. We just have quantification over events and predicates of events. For an adverbial sentence to be true is for an event (an action) to satisfy a predicate (instantiate a property). For John to run quickly is for an event of John’s running to have the property of being quick. Adverbs are predicates of events. That is the logical form of an action sentence. It is hard to find counterexamples and objections to this theory; it is simple and straightforward, and has the ring of truth. For someone to run quickly is for that person’s run to be quick. We can apply this to both types and tokens: the type of a cheetah running is quick, and so are the tokens of that type. How could this theory not be correct?
From an ontological point of view, the theory looks to be on solid ground. There are events, actions are events, and adverbs qualify events. They don’t qualify objects: you can’t say “This cat quickly”. Nor do they qualify properties or attributes: you can’t say “Tabby is a quickly cat”. You can say “Tabby runs quickly”. If there were no events, there would be no need for adverbs; and if there are events, we need a way to describe them—as slow or quick, careful or careless, at midnight or midday. Actions are events that are performed by agents, and adverbs describe how these events are performed—what kind of events they are (quick or slow). For any adverbial sentence, there is a corresponding adjectival sentence with the same truth conditions and meaning. What more could you ask of a theory? It is built on a sound metaphysics and it gets the semantics right. It doesn’t postulate queer ad hoc entities and it faces no convincing counterexamples in the form of sentences not analyzable this way. It would appear that our work is done.
But a puzzle remains: if the theory is that good, why do adverbs exist at all? Russell can respond to a similar question by appealing to considerations of syntactic simplicity—natural language abbreviates the longer analysis supplied by his theory for ease of use. But adverbs don’t do much abbreviating; they add syntactic complexity. Why not just say what you want to say in explicitly predicative terms? Why not say “John’s run was quick”? Do any natural languages do this, and if they do why don’t all? Why don’t we refer to events and predicate properties of them—as we do for particular objects and kinds of objects? It would simplify matters and give the child one less bit of grammar to learn. Natural language begins to look strangely structured, at odds with reality. Does it result from some kind of brain quirk out of sync with ontology? It seems logically (and ontologically) misleading. It seems pointlessly in error—suggesting such things as manners of property instantiation (“John instantiates running in a quick manner” or “John quickly-instantiates running”). Why not just say “John’s run was quick” or some such? I don’t know why—it is genuinely puzzling. We could call this the “puzzle of adverbs”—why don’t they wear their semantics on their sleeve? Why did it take ingenuity to come up with Davidson’s theory? It didn’t take much ingenuity to come up with the predicate theory of adjectives, so why do adverbs present a hurdle to overcome? Why did Davidson have to be clever in order to come up with his theory? Why does it seem, if only momentarily, that it might not be correct? It’s enough to make you think you might have missed something. It seems inarguably true and yet not obviously (superficially) true. The possibility of a counterexample seems ever-present. As I say, puzzling.[1]
[1] I don’t believe Davidson ever addressed this problem (or anyone else). How can a semantic theory be both clearly true and yet not apparently true? Russell’s theory is not clearly true and has been seriously contested, but Davidson’s has the look of a truism—an apparently false one.
You say there are no obvious counterexamples to the theory that for an adverbial sentence to be true is for an event (an action) to satisfy a predicate (instantiate a property); but I wonder whether this is correct. Here is a suggestion that it is not – one that can, I think, be defended without ontological extravagance, and which leads to a (purely speculative) suggestion about why we have adverbs.
Consider ‘John ate hungrily’. Here, it seems to me, it would be unnatural to say that the sentence reports an act of eating that could be described as hungry. Acts of eating aren’t among the kinds of things that can be hungry; people are. So, the better understanding would seem to be that the sentence says that John ate in the manner of a person who was hungry, and/or simply that he ate while being hungry.
If so, then even though it seems clearly right that in adverbial sentences the adverbs describe how events are performed, it’s not always true that adverbial sentences merely describe what kind of events the relevant events are. The eating wasn’t a hungry event. Sometimes, describing how the event is performed is not just a matter of describing the event adjectivally. It’s a matter of characterising the action by reference to the adjectivally-describable nature of (an) agent(s) who (either typically, or perhaps just in the one instance) perform(s) (an) action(s) with certain properties.
I don’t know how many plausible examples of this kind that there may be, but I suspect that fertile ground may be found in sentences using adverbs that make implicit reference to certain aspects of the psychology of the agent, e.g. ‘Jane replied sadly (or disaffectedly, or dishonestly, or determinedly, or stubbornly, or reluctantly)’.
These examples may be less clear-cut than the ‘hungrily’ one: I suppose it’s not clearly wrong to say that an action of replying can, itself, be disaffected. Even so, it might be that this is the product of a kind of transferring of epithet from agent to action: the basic or primary meaning might still be that the action of replying was done in the manner characteristic of a disaffected person. (In some instances, reference to the ‘manner characteristic of’ may be absent: we sometimes just mean that the action was done by a person who on this occasion of acting had the relevant property. Replying dishonestly, after all, is just a matter of giving a reply while knowing it to be false.) So, even though it is natural enough to describe an action of replying as dishonest, it is a necessary condition of the reply’s dishonesty that it be given by a person who is being dishonest in giving it, and I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that it is the person’s dishonesty that ‘comes first’, so to speak.
At any rate, that’s the case for saying that the theory as stated is an oversimplification: at least some adverbial sentences don’t merely reference properties of events. Sometimes, it’s properties of the agent that are at the core.
This needn’t – I think – be ontologically extravagant in any way you would object to: it doesn’t require manners of eating in addition to John, his property of being hungry, and the event of his eating with its properties. Yes, I have referred to John’s eating in the manner of a person who is hungry; but ontologically-speaking that requires only that there be similarities between the properties of acts of eating done by people who possess some property such as being hungry that are not shared by acts of eating done by people who lack that property. And it’s obvious that such similarities exist: hungry people’s actions of eating are typically faster and noisier (for example) than those of the unhungry. And similarly for the other example of Jane’s replying in the manner of a disaffected person.
And then – though this is pure speculation – the existence of adverbs might be explained as arising out of the fact that there are at least three different things that we may be doing with different adverbial sentences. Sometimes, as in ‘John ran quickly’, we want to convey that the event had a certain property: the running was quick. At other times, we want to say that the agent was a certain way when (s)he acted (‘Jane replied dishonestly’ = [roughly] ‘Jane replied and her assertion was untrue and she knew it’). At other times still, we want to say that the action had a property typical of the actions of agents who have a certain property (‘Peter suggested fancifully’ = [roughly] ‘Peter made a suggestion that was pretty improbable, as people do whose assertions are driven by whimsy rather than reason and/or evidence’). The suggestion would then be that perhaps in ordinary life we don’t care much about these distinctions between these different things that we may be doing, and we don’t notice them; with the result that adverbs perhaps emerge as a usefully economical linguistic device in that they cover all three, as well as avoiding the long-windedness of the kind of glosses that I have needed to use to capture the capture the second and (especially) the third usages.
These are very reasonable comments, and nicely stated. You should write a paper on this subject. My inclination is to say that “John ate hungrily” means something like “John performed an act of eating while hungry”, and similarly for the other sentences you cite. I don’t think we need to bring in manners of eating as anything over and above this. Your speculation sounds plausible, but the apparatus of adverbs is pretty dispensable if it is correct. I find myself wishing to say that these kinds of cases are “pseudo-adverbial”, unlike “quickly” etc.
Thank you. I think you are right that I will struggle to find a compelling example in which anything more than the ‘John performed an act of eating while hungry’ form of analysis is required, and so you may be right that manners of doing things aren’t needed. My idea that there is a third type of case in which we allude to what is typical of the actions people with certain characteristics may be an error.
What do you say about those usages of adverbs that don’t seem to characterise either an action or its agent, but involve a comment on the entire situation – things like ‘Regrettably, your propeller is beyond repair’? (I think some people call them ‘sentence adverbs’.) Will these be pseudo-adverbial too?
They seem to be versions of “I regret that etc.”. Compare: “Conjunctly, p and q”, or “Negatively, p”, or “Necessarily, p”. But it is interesting that such uses exist or can be introduced.