Chapter 7 presents a theory of the Progressive Form in which the PROG-operator is broken up into BE and -ING. This makes it impossible to maintain the central position attributed to the Progressive in the analysis of imperfectivity. The situation turns out to be more complex but can be accounted for compositionally by giving -ing its own semantic value. The chapter also shows how the binary approach to compositionality bridges the gap between the analysis of Slavic and non-Slavic aspect. It formalizes an aspectual theory which accounts for a wide variety of Slavic languages. It continues by focussing on the position of the aorist in rich tense systems where it has to survive marginally or where it has obtained an important position. A comparison is made with aoristic tense forms in systems that are (re-)organized binarily such as French. That opens the way for a deeper insight in the semantics of tense forms in languages where the aorist does not or no longer appears.

Nicholas Allott considers how relevance theory can be seen as responding to doubts about the possibility of any kind of systematic pragmatic theory. He considers three sceptical positions: Fodor’s argument that pragmatic processes are not amenable to scientific study because they are unencapsulated (highly context-sensitive), Chomsky’s claim that human intentional action is a mystery rather than a scientifically tractable problem, and a third view which maintains that intentional communication is too complex for systematic study. Allott argues that work in relevance theory can be seen as successfully challenging these sceptical views and he gives concrete examples of its achievements.

The chapter addresses the concept of ‘explicature’, a notion which has been central to relevance theory from its inception and which introduced a radically new way of thinking about explicitly communicated meaning and about the semantics–pragmatics distinction. Victoria Escandell-Vidal focuses here on how utterances of particular expressions in Spanish (some occurrences of the verb estar and some uses of 3rd-person imperfective forms) lead to ‘higher-level’ explicatures expressing a speaker’s evidential commitment. She argues that the evidential meaning does not arise from the semantic composition of linguistically encoded content but rather emerges as the optimal solution to a ‘feature mismatch’ between two components of encoded meaning.