Making Progressives: Necessary Conditions are Sufficient

Abstract

In order to cope with the imperfective paradox, the assumption that the event in progress must get completed, if not in the actual world, then in a counterfactual world or worlds, has been a part of the standard modal approach to the progressive since Dowty (1977). This is generally coupled with the further assumption that some variant of normalcy should be used to single out the relevant counterfactual continuations. Recently, however, Bonomi (1999), Gendler Szabó (2004, 2008) and Wulf (2009) have argued against these assumptions. The present paper suggests that the counter-arguments give compelling evidence that the truth-conditions of the progressive are weaker than is assumed by the standard approach, and that the normalcy requirement should be replaced by reference to the conditions necessary for the completion of the event.

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