Abstract

If Jones buttered the toast at midnight, there is, according to Davidson, an event of Jones’ buttering of the toast. But what kind of temporal phenomenon is being referred to if Jones is in the midst of buttering the toast? By taking a Davidsonian events-based semantics as its starting point, this thesis seeks an answer to the question of “What account of temporal ontology is needed in order to explain the semantic features of the progressive aspect in English?”. In order to answer the foregoing question, this thesis critically evaluates several contemporary accounts of the ontology of process, or, equivalently, the temporal ontology associated with the English progressive. These ontological accounts of process—namely those advocated by several notable neo-Davidsonians, as well as accounts by authors such as Taylor, Steward, Crowther, and Hornsby—will all be found to be wanting. By developing some remarks entered by Dummett concerning a famous passage by Frege on the notion of countability, this thesis ends by suggesting how it is that the comparatively austere temporal ontology associated with traditional Davidsonian semantics provides us with a plausible temporal ontology of the English progressive