Situations as Strings

Situations serving as worlds as well as events in linguistic semantics are formulated as strings recording observations over discrete time. This formulation is applied to Priorean tense logic, in line with L. Schubert's distinction between described and characterized situations. The distinction is developed topologically and computationally, and linked to the opposition between truth-conditional and proof-conditional semantics. For a finitary handle on quantification, the conception of situations-as-strings is extended from observation to derivation.