The goal we had in mind when embarking on this work was to write a Grammar of the English tense system which was at the same time a scientific study and a work which could be used as a reference grammar by linguists and students of English with a basic knowledge of descriptive linguistics and a fairly advanced proficiency in English. | VII. Actualization aspect bounded vs nonbounded 77 I am going to walk three miles in an hour. I was walking three miles in an hour when I sprained my ankle . The first example is a bounded sentence with a VP that is telic because the length of the walk is pre-determined see . In the second example the VP is also telic because the distance is again pre-determined it has been determined before the walking started and because in an hour forms part of the situation-template VP . However the sentence is L-nonbounded because the progressive form was walking only refers to some middle part of the actualization of the situation and disregards its possible terminal point. Non boundedness vs a telicity The bounded versus nonbounded distinction is often identified with the telic versus atelic distinction discussed in section . However there is clear evidence that these two distinctions represent two quite different parameters. A telicity is a question of verb phrases situation-templates see whereas non boundedness is a question of clauses. Put differently a telicity has to do with whether the speaker conceptualizes a kind of situation as having a natural point of completion or not whereas non boundedness has to do with whether the speaker represents the actualization of a situation as reaching an inherent or arbitrary endpoint or not. A VP like run five miles is telic because five miles implies a natural point of completion but it can be used both in a bounded clause Bill ran five miles and in a nonbounded one Bill was running five miles . This shows how grammatical aspect can interact with ontological aspect to determine actualization aspect run five miles is a telic VP but since the progressive form only refers to a portion of the middle part of the actualizing situation the sentence does not represent the actualization of the situation as bounded i. e. as reaching the natural point of completion. In fact since the sentence Bill was running .
