Motion in event structure

According to a localist theory of event semantics, event types such as state changes and realisation of actions are based on motion events, which are taken to be the primary type of event. The present paper investigates some claims of this theory, their consequences and conceptual foundations. It argues that the theory suffers from two flaws. First, the theory proposes parallels between event types that, upon closer scrutiny, appear to be absent. Second, it purports to derive time from motion, which is conceptually dubious, because motion presupposes time, while time does not presuppose motion. We propose that a more promising basis for a theory of events that attempts to generalise over event types is to ground event structure in the temporal domain. The foundational contrast between events would then not be motion and stationariness but rather the presence or absence of change, which is a ubiquitous, domain-neutral condition that is made possible by time.