Donald Davidson has deeply influenced contemporary work on the semantics of action sentences and adverbial modifiers, mainly through his seminal papers on event analyses together with his related discussions of actions, events, and causation. This chapter will trace these contributions, beginning with Davidson's semantic proposals and then turning to his metaphysical views.

An “action sentence” such as (1), in which the grammatical subject seems to be associated with a notion of agency, can be paraphrased as in (2).

1. Brutus stabbed Caesar.

2. There was a stabbing of Caesar by Brutus.

Intuitively, (2) says that something happened: there was an event of a certain sort; in particular, there was a stabbing – a stabbing of Caesar by Brutus. So we can, with a little awkwardness, paraphrase (1) as

1. (3) For some event e, e was a stabbing of Caesar by Brutus.

Starting with this observation, Davidson (1980b [1967]) argued that theorists can and should specify the meaning of a sentence such as (1) with an overtly quantificational construction along the lines of (3). If this is correct, it has wide-ranging implications for the study of meaning. It also raises the question, which Davidson (1980 [1969]) addressed, of what events are: what kind of thing does one quantify over when one (covertly) quantifies over events?

Sections one and two summarize Davidson's (1980b [1967]) core proposal and his main argument for it.