It is an ancient idea that many verbs are used to describe events—things that happen, in places and at times. Frank Plumpton Ramsey introduced an important twist, in the context of distinguishing events from facts. Suppose that Aggie hit Pat. Then on Ramsey's view, the fact reported with (1)

• (1) Aggie hit Pat

is the general proposition that there was a hitting of Pat by Aggie. This existential generalization, unlike any event, has no specific spatiotemporal properties. But any event of Aggie hitting Pat verifies (1). So the action report seems to mean that an event of a certain sort occurred. Though at least initially, it is not clear how to square this with the compositionality of linguistic meaning. Let the invented monadic predicate Aghipatish₁ be satisfied by z if and only if (iff) z was a hitting of Pat by Aggie. Then plausibly...