Temporal Reference Frames and the Imperfective Paradox

This paper brings new evidence to bear on the topic of the Imperfective Paradox – a semantic puzzle involving tense-aspectual categories that lack completion entailments. The lack of completion entailments is usually associated with the so-called progressive and conative readings, illustrated in the Russian sentences in (1) and (2) respectively. In these examples, the matrix event described by an imperfective predicate may fail to reach its natural culmination (in the real world, at least).