The previous section has brought to light that adverbial jeweils cannot quantify over just any complex event. I have shown that adverbial jeweils is insensitive to subevent structures imposed by material-whole relations. Instead, the adverbial quantifier jeweils was argued to quantify over pluralic entities with atomic substructure. Since adverbial
jeweils normally distributes over an implicit plurality of events that is not overtly
expressed in the clause, the plurality must be recoverable from the linguistic context. So far, we have encountered two ways for the linguistic context to provide a plurality of events over which jeweils could quantify: (i.) by conjunction of two or more atomic sentences as in (35ab); or (ii.) by means of an atomic sentence with plural participants as in (31).
Quantification with adverbial jeweils is also possible following an adverbially quantified sentence, as in (36).18
(36) John schlief fünfmal/ oft / selten. Er hatte jeweils süße Träume. John slept five times often seldom He had each.time sweet dreams This means that we have to include adverbial quantification in our list of linguistic contexts that create pluralities of events.
The distinction between atomic events and pluralities of atomic events also helps to solve the puzzle of ‘maximal’ events raised by Brisson (1998). Brisson (1998:131ff.) argues that (37a), with the logical representation in (37b), can be made true by many different events.
(37) a. John ate beans.
b. ∃e [∃y beans’(y) & ate’(john, y, e)]
According to Brisson, (37b) is made true not only by the event of John eating beans, but also by the (materially) complex event (in her terminology a ‘plural event’) of John eating beans and the Yankees’ winning the World Series in 1996. Another complex event that makes (37b) true is – according to Brisson - the event consisting of John eating the beans, of the Yankees winning the World Series, and of Nixon’s visit to China. Nevertheless,
17 The present analysis requires us to treat plural arguments of collective predicates as plural or group
individuals. This leads to the analysis in (ib) for (ia).
(i) a. The boys gathered in the hallway. b. ∃e [gathered’(the_boys’, e) ∧ IN(ιx.hallway’(x), e)]
18 Again, I assume that the plural set of events E’ that serves as the restriction for jeweils is formed by the
operation of abstraction (cf. fn.14). The value for E’ in (ib) is determined on the base of the flattened discourse representation structure in (ia):
(i) a. [e element E]<5e>[John slept in e] b. E’ = ∑ e: [e element E, John slept in e]
The restricting set E must be contextually given. The semantics of fünfmal ‘five times’ ensure that only maximal temporally complex sleeping events are counted.
there is a clear feeling that (37a) is only a statement about the simple event of John eating beans. So how to prevent events from becoming too big?
Brisson suggests to use Kratzer’s idea of an ‘event for a proposition’ in order to solve the problem of excluding events that are too big. I would like to suggest a different approach and argue that the problem of maximal events is only apparent. It arises because Brisson does not make a distinction between materially complex events (i.e. a dinner eating by Ede), which can consist of material subparts, and plural events, which are sets of individual (possibly materially complex) events. For her, all complex events are materially complex (and consequently mereologically structured) events, which she calls ‘plural events’. As a result, the disparate events of John eating beans, the Yankees winning the World Series, and Nixon visiting China can combine to form a rather unnatural materially complex event.
I do not subscribe to this view. Citing Link (1998:240), it was already pointed out in fn. 15 that “… not every such collection [of events, MZ] can in a significant sense be considered a coherent part of the world: for that to be the case it is necessary that a sum of events be closed or saturated with respect to all lawful constraints that organize reality and hold it together”. What this means is that random collections of disparate events cannot combine to form an individual (though complex) event if they share no relevant properties (causal connection, temporal inclusion/overlap of running time, homogenous subpart etc.) in common. It follows that (37a) is not a statement about a materially complex event, but only about the individual event of John eating beans. This statement will be true in a situation containing this event regardless of whether other disparate events such as the Yankees’ victory, and Nixon’s visit form a plurality of events with it. Regarding such a plurality of events E, (37a) will be either undefined or (when interpreted distributively) false (for it is only a statement about an individual event). I conclude that the apparent puzzle of maximal events raised by (37a) disappears as soon as we discard the possibility that random collections of events can combine to form a materially complex event. Following Link, I take this to be a plausible assumption.
Observe finally, that (38) confirms the singular status of the event described by (37a). Adverbial jeweils cannot distribute over the denotation of (37a) because the latter does not introduce a plurality of events into the discourse.19
(38) #John aß Bohnen. Jeweils schien die Sonne. John ate beans each time shone the sun
Summing up, it has been shown that events can be complex in different ways and that it is important to be aware of these differences. Adverbial jeweils can only quantify over participant complex events. On the natural assumption that adverbial quantifiers range over pluralities of events – just as adnominal quantifiers range over pluralities of individuals – this difference argues for a treatment of participant complex events as pluralities of atomic events. It was also shown that the plurality of events that serves as the domain of quantification for jeweils must be introduced overtly in the preceding discourse, either by the presence of a plural argument, or by sentence conjunction, or by adverbial quantification. In the normal case, adverbial jeweils picks up its domain across a sentence boundary. This makes adverbial jeweils a discourse phenomenon that should be accounted for in a dynamic semantic framework such as DRT, or Groenendijk & 19 The only way to interpret (38), albeit marginally, is on an iterative reading, as in (i):
Stokhof’s (1990, 1991) dynamic semantics. The dynamic semantic behaviour of adverbial
jeweils is discussed in section 2.3.