Davidsonian event semantics has become immensely influential in contemporary natural language semantics. On that view, all events (including acts and states) are considered the same ontologically, i.e., Davidsonian particulars, and they all serve as arguments of verbs and corresponding nominalizations. We argue that that view has to be rejected both ontologically and on the level of compositional semantics. We argue that natural language reflects two related ontological distinctions: first a distinction between base events (BE) and plan events (PE) (which are based on plans or procedures); second a distinction between acts and intentional acts. We propose an ontological account of PEs and intentional acts based on Fine’s notion of a qua object: a PE is a BE qua realizing a plan and an intentional act is an act qua realizing an intention. The BE-PE distinction manifests itself in existence predicates for events and predicates of participation (take part in, participate, be part of). Unlike Fine, we allow properties of qua events to be inherited not only from their base (temporal part structure), but also from their gloss, namely as a ‘slot mereology’ consisting of plan-specific roles, which can be specified for particular individuals or be open. Whereas the ordinary noun part (as in the parts of) picks out parts of the former part structure, the light noun part in the predicates take part in and be part of picks out roles inherited from the plan. Whereas take part in can relate to both specified and open roles, be part of can only target specified roles. The distinction between BEs and PEs is encoded in lexical semantics only; the distinction between acts and intentional acts is also encoded in syntax, in the presence of a silent operator. This requires a more complex form of event semantics than standard Davidsonian semantics.

This talk will outline a novel semantics of modals based not on possible worlds and quantifiers ranging over them, but on what I will call ‘modal objects’, entities of the sort of permissions, obligations, needs, abilities, and essences. According to that semantics, modal predicates take modal objects as their implicit (Davidsonian) argument and the complement clause (or prejacent) of the modal acts as a predicate characterizing the modal object in terms of its satisfiers (truthmakers) and possibly violators (falsifiers), in roughly the sense of Fine's recent truthmaker semantics. On this approach, the difference between modals of necessity and possibility is made a matter of ontology as are inferential relations among modal sentences.