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1. Bierwisch Manfred Bierwisch starts his comment with the complaint that crucial parts of our paper rely on van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005). This is of course true, and it points to a predicament of which we have been aware: In order that we could say, within the space allotted to us, that which we wanted to say in this paper almost all the technical details of van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005) had to be left out. We do not agree, however, with Bierwisch' contention that someone familiar with the book could just as well have done without the paper. For one thing, the book, while acknowledging DRT as an important motivation for the ‘Proper Treatment of Events’ approach it presents, has no explicit discussion of the formal relations between the two theories, let alone any hints of how they could be put together. And precisely this is a central message of the paper: that there is a way of combining the two and that a combination of DRT and PTE techniques can help to bridge the gap between formal and cognitive aspects of linguistic structure and meaning.