Abstract

Intuitively Austinian propositions are propositions that tell us something about a situation In this paper we will consider Austinian propositions and the associated notion that situations support infons which are to be found in situation theory and situation semantics We will try to tease out the consequences of taking the Austinian approach advocated in situation semantics as opposed to a very similar approach originally proposed by Davidson That is that event predicates where events are to be generally conceived so as to be more like the notion of sit uation i e including states and processes are taken to have an argument position for an event We will do this comparison with respect to an area of data that was part of the original motivation for situation semantics naked in nitive perception complements see Barwise and Perry We will see that negative descriptions of events are one area where the Austinian and Davidsonian approaches make dif ferent predictions and at the end of the paper we will brie y consider negative event descriptions more generally with particular reference to the DRT analysis based on a Davidsonian approach as exempli ed by Amsili and Le Draoulec this volume..