Progressive : The Imperfective Paradox

The Imperfective Paradox is a puzzle known since antiquity. A modern instance is this: we may say truly that Mozart was finishing the Requiem before he died and that, however, he never finished it. How can both these claims be true? What is it about the semantics of sentences of the forms ⌜x was F‐ing⌝ and ⌜x F‐ed⌝ that makes this possible? In the formal semantics literature, opinion is divided between those who solve the puzzle by suggesting that progressive morphology creates an intensional context and those who rely on an extensional interpretation of the progressive. Several authors, moreover, converge on the view that the truth value of progressive sentences is irreducibly context dependent, though they may disagree on the locus and the extent of the context dependence. A reconstruction of the debate and of the empirical issues involved is offered.