Under progressive marking, telic predicates can describe events that fail
to reach culmination. Prominent accounts of the so-called *imperfective
paradox* tie the effect to the modal accessibility of culmination,
intensionalizing the progressive operator so that it instantiates
qualifying (culminated) eventualities across a set of evaluation-world
alternatives. This approach faces a number of persistent empirical
challenges, including the acceptability of progressives of unlikely or
locally out-of-reach events. We propose a new approach, on which telic
progressives are instead sensitive to (mereological) structure inherited
from an event type associated with telic predicate P. An event type here
constitutes a formal causal model (e.g., Pearl 2000) in which P's
culmination condition C occurs as a dependent (caused) variable. The model
provides a set of causal pathways for realizing C, each comprising a set of
jointly sufficient conditions for C, and establishes (sets of) conditions
which preclude C. The progress of an actual P-eventuality can then be
measured with respect to the event type: a reference time situation
*s* satisfies
PROG(P) just in case it is a plausible cross-section of an incomplete
causal pathway in P. This approach shifts the intensional element of
imperfective paradox effects from the progressive operator to the
denotation of telic predicates themselves, and delivers improved judgements
for challenging paradox data.
