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This chapter serves as an introduction to the themes of the book. The thesis of temporal supervenience is that all facts about ordinary time, all facts shaped by our ordinary temporal discourse, logically supervene on facts about spacetime; what goes on in spacetime fully determines what goes on in ordinary time. Temporal supervenience has many aspects, corresponding to various kinds of supervenient temporal phenomena. Among the most basic phenomena are persistence and change through ordinary time. The problem of temporal supervenience with respect to these phenomena has two components. The first component is to specify the spatiotemporal supervenience base of persistence and change. How do objects occupy spacetime? And how are properties instantiated across occupied spacetime? The second component is to build an explanatory bridge from the supervenience base to the supervenient phenomena. Such a bridge requires an ‘analysis’ of temporal existence and temporal instantiation, that is, a semantic account of ordinary temporal predications such as ‘a was F’. The problem of temporal supervenience thus connects the metaphysics of time with the semantics of temporal discourse. Before the supervenience of ordinary temporal facts on spacetime facts can be explained, the shape of ordinary time needs to be clarified. This is a further task of Chapter 1. Tenserism and A-time are criticized in the context of temporal supervenience with the aim of promoting detenserism as the correct account of tense and B-time as the true shape of ordinary time.

The chapter argues that in‐adverbials as in Jane walked five miles in one hour do not directly measure the event, but rather an interval containing the event. This explains why they work on a descending scale, so that the shorter the interval for which a claim is made, the stronger the claim. It also accounts for a number of constraints on in‐adverbials, e.g. #Jane walked five miles in at least one hour.

The distributional flexibility shown by adverbials in Norwegian is explained by assuming a 3D phrase structure where adverbials originate in the third dimension and are “bent” into the two‐dimensional phrase structural plane as part of Spell‐Out. An important type of support for the analysis is that it facilitates a simple analysis of the distribution of weak pronouns.

The paper argues that the free postverbal order of the Hungarian sentence cannot be either the result of random base‐generation, or the result of syntactic Scrambling or flattening. It is a PF operation, because it also affects postverbal adverbials and quantifiers c‐commanding their scope at the interfaces. The units of reordering are the phonological phrases.

The distinction between coordination and subordination is not clear-cut. The essence of coordination is the mental juxtaposition of structures construed as parallel and co-equal. Subordination has a number of dimensions, including form, the participation of one clause in the relationship profiled by another, and a clause's profile being overridden at the composite structure level. Constituency and profiling are often flexible, depending on factors like the size of clauses and their discourse function. The traditional division into adverbial, relative, and complement clauses is based primarily on how clauses are connected with one another. To the extent that these distinctions hold, they are based on semantic function rather than specific structural configurations. In the case of complements, the classic distinction between control and raising constructions is non-fundamental, the latter being just a special case of the former. Finite and nonfinite complements differ not just in form but in meaning and typical function. Predicates taking finite complements pertain to the epistemic status of propositions; those taking nonfinite complements pertain to the realization of occurrences. Complementation involves multiple conceptualizers and levels of conception. Different conceptualizers apprehend the same proposition each from their own perspective, assessing it with respect to their own conception of reality. Complement-taking predicates refer to different phases of this assessment. Impersonal constructions invoke a conceptualizer and the relevant scope of awareness in generalized fashion, suggesting that anyone would make the assessment under the circumstances.

The distinction between coordination and subordination is claimed to be a structural universal. However, the structural criteria used to distinguish coordination from subordination do not match up across languages. This chapter proposes a functional analysis of complex sentence structure in terms of the Gestalt distinction between figure and ground. Coordination and complements constitute a complex figure (following Wierzbicka), while adverbial clauses and relative clauses constitute a figure-ground structure (following Talmy and Reinhart). Coordination and complementation are linked by grammaticalization, via serial verb constructions, and adverbial clauses and relative clauses are also linked by grammaticalization. Comparative and conditional relations are ambivalent, and expressed crosslinguistically by either complex figure or figure-ground constructions. A conceptual space is presented to account for Cristofaro’s implicational hierarchies for different types of semantic relations between situations and their encoding as balanced (asserted, and more coordinate-like) and deranked (nonasserted, less coordinate-like) complex sentence constructions.

In most languages of Europe, there is a polysemy pattern to the effect that one and the same marker (e.g., English who) is used to introduce both questions and subordinate clauses. This situation is cross-linguistically unusual, and this chapter attempts to account for why such a polysemy pattern exists and why it is, to a large extent, confined to the languages of Europe or to languages that have been in contact with Indo-European languages.

In a recent influential paper, King offers empirical evidence against the assumption that there are tense operators in English. King argues that the metalinguistic truth-conditions for tensed sentences offered by eternalists are to serve as representations of the logical form of these sentences as well. A sentence like ‘John was a firefighter’ thus contains the quantified noun phrase ‘some past time’ rather than the past-tense operator ‘it was the case that’ at the level of logical form. Here I show why this argument is potentially troublesome for the temporalist and propose a solution.

This chapter further extends the data set of this book in two ways. First of all, it briefly discusses the occurrence of spading in Eastern Norwegian and French. Secondly, it focuses on two other instances of stranding under sluicing: the stranding of the adverb dan ‘then’ in Dutch and the stranding of adverbial modifiers such as exactly. The former is shown to be substantially different from spading (despite superficial similarities), while the latter is shown to interact in an interesting way with both spading and swiping. In particular, the fact that a swiped preposition and a spaded demonstrative can intervene between a sluiced wh-phrase and an adverbial modifier indicates that the two do not form a constituent at Spell-Out and that the adverbial modifier is stranded inside the CP-domain as well. As such, swiping and spading can be used as a constituency diagnostic for sluiced phrases.

I concluded in the previous chapter that the Complementizer‐layer includes a position for the speaker's temporal coordinate. The issue I consider here is whether this position can ever be overtly realized by some specific element in the syntax, recognizable as a first person marked item. I show that the position projected by the speaker's coordinates is visible in some peculiar structures and that it is actually occupied by a verbal form overtly marked with first person features expressing an epistemic meaning, such as credo (I believe/I think), penso (I think), immagino (I imagine), and the like. By analysing the properties of credo (I believe/think) — the subject‐less first person present tense verbal form of the epistemic verb credere (to believe/ to think) — I show that the sequence credo (I think) + clause must be considered as a mono‐clausal structure and that credo occupies in these cases the left‐most position in the Complementizer‐layer.

This chapter covers the basic Homeric grammar for Homer's poems of the Odyssey. For nouns, it includes the first, second, and third declension, of which some lack contraction. It includes some pronouns that are considered common, while others remain unchanged in declension or are observed with Homeric alteration. The Homeric grammar on verbs have person endings, verb tenses, moods, infinitives, and contracted verbs. It also mentions suffixes that are used to create adverbs and prepositions in Attic Greek that were originally adverbs and have pure adverbial force in Homer. The adverbs are best taken as prefixes to the verb, while particles show that a remark is generalizing.

We are still provisionally assuming the truth of physical realism. Within this realist framework, the rejection of SDR obliges us to accept the broad representative theory (BRT). This claims that, whenever someone perceives a physical item, his perceptual contact with it is psychologically mediated, i.e. it is constituted by the combination of his being in some more fundamental psychological state, which is not in itself physical‐item perceptive, and certain additional facts that do not involve anything further about his current psychological condition. One important issue now is: what is the nature of these mediating psychological states? And in particular, what is the nature of the mediating states involved in Φ‐terminal perception? Obviously, the states are of an experiential kind; and, in the case of Φ‐terminal perception, they cover the phenomenal content of the perceiving. So, in the case of Φ‐terminal perception, we can speak of them as phenomenal‐experiential (PE) states, and speak of instances of them as phenomenal experiences.

Phenomenal experiences are such as to invite the subject to believe that he is presentationally aware of some physical item. A number of theories can be shown to be unsatisfactory because they do not do justice to the presentational feel of such experiences. They include the cognitive theory, which takes such experiences to be the acquiring of putative information about the physical environment, and the imagist proposal, which takes them to be a passive form of imagistic conceiving. One traditional theory that does justice to the presentational feel of phenomenal experience is the sense‐datum theory (SDT). As I initially represent it, SDT claims that each phenomenal experience divides into two components: (i) a non‐conceptual sensory component, which consists in the presentation of an internal object of awareness, which has no existence outside the context of the presentational awareness directed onto it; this object is termed a ‘sense‐datum’; and (ii) a conceptual component, consisting in the interpretation of the sense‐datum as an external item of a certain kind, presented to the subject in a certain perspective. But the trouble with SDT, thus understood, is that it is impossible to make sense of something's being an internal object of awareness in the envisaged sense, since, if the object has no ontological life independently of the awareness, there is nothing genuinely there for the awareness to be an awareness of. One way of responding to this point would be to replace SDT by the adverbial theory. This theory too takes a phenomenal experience to divide into sensory and interpretative components, but it construes the sensory component not as a sensory awareness of an object, but as a sensory awareness in a certain manner. But the problem with the adverbial theory is that, in rejecting the relational character of the sensory awareness, it loses the ability to explain the presentational feel of phenomenal experience. The correct solution is to accept SDT, but with a crucial revision. In this revision, the presented sense‐data are re‐construed as sensory universals, each of which is capable of presentational occurrence in any number of minds and on any number of occasions. Thus re‐construed, sense‐data become sense‐qualia, and the sense‐datum theory becomes the sense‐quale theory (SQT). Sense‐qualia are entities that can only exist as objects of presentational awareness. But because each sense‐quale can occur in different minds and at different times, it has the right kind of ontological independence from any given presentation to leave no problem as to how it can serve as a genuine object of awareness.

This chapter describes a method of doing philosophy, the method of “ordinary language” philosophy, or more appropriately, “piecemeal philosophical engineering.” It then applies this method to three questions connected with the concept of freedom: What makes the problem of free will so difficuult to grasp, and hence so difficult to solve? What is the moral value of freedom, that is, does it have an “absolute” value rather than a “conditional” value? In what respects is freedom a “negative” concept? The chapter first considers reasons why we should avoid saying either that philosophy is or is not linguistic before explaining the use of “free from” as a verbal and adjectival phrase, along with adverbial freedom and adjectival freedom. It also looks at cases of the idiom “free to,” plus a couple of sentences just involving “free” as a contrast, and concludes with an analysis of freedom as “trouser-word.”

Davidson attempts to state the logical form of sentences in which actions are adverbially modified (e.g. ‘Jones buttered the toast slowly, with a knife, at midnight’); he wishes to regiment them into first‐order notation such that all valid inferences to sentences containing words of the original one are preserved. He claims that the only effective way of doing so is to transform the adverbs into predicates and recognize an implicit quantification over an entity to which the predicates apply (cf Appendix A); this entity he identifies as a dated, non‐recurrent particular––an event. Rival construals that do not require such an ontology either fail to preserve the inferences or end up assigning the adverbs to distinct actions. Davidson appends his replies to various critics of the paper in which he clarifies his methodology (applying the concept of logical form to sentences of natural language), the individuation of events (see further Essay 8), and suggests how his analysis can be extended to cover tensed action sentences.

Davidson repeats the motivation for accepting the existence of events that he brought out in Essay 8, especially stressing that natural languages supply not only appropriate singular terms apparently denoting events but also the appropriate machinery of reference including quantification and identity‐statements involving those terms. He then looks at an alternative theory, espoused by Roderick Chisholm, in which events are not particulars but universals, denoted not by singular terms but expressed by complete sentences. Davidson asks how well the theory succeeds in dealing with adverbial modification (see Essay 6), whether Chisholm's events can be counted or quantified over, and whether a sentential theory can avoid collapsing all co‐referring ‘events’ into the one event that occurs (an argument Davidson spelt out in greater detail in Essay 8). More generally, he investigates what makes an entity ‘recurrent’, stressing the context‐relativity of required similarity across instantiations.