This chapter will argue that the ontological categories that we require for understanding meaning and meaning composition in natural language cannot be exclusively proxied by external objects in the world or judgments of truth. In other words, a set of metaphysically justified ontological objects is not what is required for natural language ontology, and the latter field should be considered a distinct philosophical and analytical exercise. The chapter takes as its central empirical ground the meaning of ’nonfinite’ verb forms in English. Paradoxes relating to the English progressive and passive constructions will be examined to show that lexical conceptual content needs to be defined more essentially, and that the integration of such essentialist content into forms which ultimately have extensionalist import requires the reification of the symbol qua symbol and the explicit representation of the utterance situation.

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.