We investigated the relative contribution of perfective and imperfective aspectual cues on situation models. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to choose pictures showing completed events than pictures showing ongoing events when they had read perfective sentences, but chose either picture after reading imperfective sentences. In Experiment 2, only one picture was presented and part...

Temporal for-adverbials and in-adverbials are commonly used as a diagnostics for distinguishing between perfective and imperfective aspect, respectively. We observe that in Czech imperfective verbs may combine with in-adverbials as long as the resulting reading is a bounded ability reading. We argue, in line with van Geenhoven (2004); Zucchi and White (2001), that there is no intrinsic grammati...

It is often assumed that French (like Greek) requires imperfective aspect as a counterfactual (CF) marker in the antecedent of PSCs (cf. e.g. [Iatridou, 2000]). This should explain why we find in the antecedent of PSCs the plus que parfait, combining imperfective morphology with a layer of perfect, cf. (1). Tenses without imperfective morphology, i.a. the passé composé (that has both simple pas...

Imperfectivity is cross-linguistically associated with the subinterval property and a modal component induced by the famous ‘imperfective paradox’. These properties arguably hold for both the progressive and habitual-iterative readings. However, both in Romance and Slavic, the imperfective may also refer to complete events instantiated in the world of evaluation: the so-called Imparfait narrati...

Imperfective or progressive verb morphology makes it possible to use the name of a whole event to refer to an activity that is clearly not a complete instance of that event, leading to what is known as the Imperfective Paradox. For example, a sentence like 'John was building a house' does not entail that a house ever got built. The Imperfective Paradox has received a number of different treatme...

The hallmark property of the Russian verbal system is taken to be the bipartite perfective/imperfective distinction in the domain of grammatical aspect. In this paper we show that there is a substantial and productive class of morphologically complex verbs that do not clearly pattern as either perfective or imperfective on standard formal (distributional) tests for perfectivity versus imperfect...

Formal semantics constitutes the framework of the research presented here, and the aim is to provide a solution to the imperfective paradox; i.e. explain why \Max was running" entails \Max ran", but \Max was running home" does not entail \Max ran home". This paper is divided into two parts. In Part I we evaluate what I will call the Eventual Outcome Strategy for solving the imperfective paradox...

The paper shows how the semantically underspecified imperfective aspect in Russian becomes associated with counterfactual complete events in specific contexts, notably in chess annotations (Restan 1989), while the perfective invariably denotes factual complete events. The counterfactual flavour of the construction invites a comparison with more standard counterfactual conditionals, including so...

The imperfective aspect in Russian competes with the perfective in referring to events whose existence is entailed by the input context. In the first, major part of the paper (sections 1-5) I take a global view on aspectual competition, which is analyzed in light of various pragmatic constraints. It is shown in a bidirectional optimization how the default/unmarked imperfective in the appropriat...