This paper offers a fresh perspective on (restrictions on) aspectual coercion, thereby focusing on the essentially epistemic import of aspectual constructions. The case study discussed here is the unexpected use of the simple tenses for ongoing event reports in sentences involving full-verb inversion. The paper argues that this attestation of the simple present/past in inverted sentences can be analyzed as a kind of aspectual mismatch between the higher-order construction and the embedded tenses. Yet at a more basic, epistemic level of analysis, there is no mismatch: the full-verb inversion construction and the embedded tenses are similar in the sense that both report events that are conceived of as fully and instantly identifiable.