Aspect in the Narrative Present Mode

In the context of narration, matrix present tense can reference times other than the speech time, e.g., the narrative "She walks into the room, goes to the window and opens it" can describe a sequence of events that unfolds in the past or in the future of the speech time. Let's call this the "narrative present mode" of narration. Narratives can also use canonical tenses, e.g., past for events in the past ("canonical mode"). 

The narrative present mode is commonly analyzed as involving evaluation time shift: whereas matrix tense is evaluated relative to the time of the speech context in the canonical mode of narration and outside of narrative discourses, in the narrative present mode the evaluation time for tense is another time, e.g., a time that precedes or follows the speech time. This account allows for a uniform analysis of tense, but on its own it does not predict that aspect should behave any differently in the narrative present mode. Yet it does: the present perfective verbs in our example narrative would instead have to be present progressive in the canonical mode (not to be confused with the "play-by-play" narrative present mode), and outside of narratives. 

Variation within the Slavic languages helps establish an empirical generalization, which English also conforms to: perfective aspect is acceptable in the narrative present mode only if it is acceptable in (non-dispositional) habituals. This suggests that there is more to the narrative present mode than just a pragmatically-conditioned evaluation time shift, and it provides support for Anand and Toosarvandani's (2020) proposal, developed on the basis of a different empirical phenomenon, that an intensional operator is responsible for the narrative present mode.