This paper focuses on non‐culminating accomplishments and distinguishes them from accomplishments used atelically. It delineates two different sources of event culmination denials after non‐progressive accomplishment sentences, namely, the perfective or a modal operator encoded in the VP. Furthermore, it argues that non‐culminating accomplishments also differ from non‐maximal accomplishments, which entail event culmination relative to a coarse granularity level, but allow culmination denials relative to a finer granularity level, via the non‐maximal use of the (in‐)definite description used to introduce the incremental theme argument.