Prerna Nadathur

 

Under progressive marking, telic predicates (e.g., write a novel, build a house) can describe eventualities that fail to reach 'expected' points of culmination: this phenomenon is known as the imperfective paradox (Dowty 1979).  Prominent approaches to the paradox associate the truth of these progressives with the likelihood of future culmination; this is achieved by means of an intensional progressive operator, which instantiates culminated eventualities (complete novel-writings or house-buildings) across modal alternatives to the evaluation world.  This explanation faces empirical challenges from the acceptability of telic progressives (e.g., Mira was crossing a minefield) for which successful culmination is extremely unlikely or even locally out of reach.

 

I propose a new approach, on which the truth of a telic progressive does not depend on the likeliness of culmination, but instead on a match between what is going on at reference time and a notion of how particular culminations typically come about.  I suggest that telic predicates reference event types, understood as idealized (normative) causal models in which the relevant culmination condition occurs when particular sets of (preparatory) conditions c0-occur.  The event type model captures world knowledge about the structure of complex events, encoding a set of 'recipes' (causal pathways) by which the appropriate culmination is typically achieved.  A telic progressive claim like Mira was crossing a minefield does not express the speaker's expectation that Mira will eventually reach the other side of the field, but instead (roughly speaking) the belief that Mira's reference-time activities correspond to some portion of a causal pathway for reaching the other side (i.e., that she is engaging in a plausible process for culmination).  

 

The approach delivers improved judgements for challenging imperfective paradox data, and—by moving a notion of modality into the denotation of telic predicates—avoids stipulating differences between grammatical aspects with respect to intensionality.  Looking ahead, it suggests a new approach to the denotation of eventuality predicates, on which familiar aspectual class properties can be derived from features of (language-independent) causal models which capture common-sense intutions and idealizations about how the world works, and how complex events are typically realized or brought about.