finis

Ed asked me to explain my "pro- & retro-spective finis" but I lost his
message and the thread thereof, so here is my clumsy answer (I'm no good at
explaining things ike he does) :

It's only very trivial, simple stuff.

The "finis" is the final process or state implied in a concept expressed with
a word.
The finis of a verb is usually equivalent to its perfective form : "to cut
down" has a finis which is the perfective process or state of the tree
falling or having fallen down. You know that the process of cutting down has
occurred once the tree is down. So you qualify the process back from that
final state. This is a retro-spective finis.
"to speak to someone" implies that your audience will be able to "get" your
message. Even though you may speak to a stone, you qualify the process of
speaking onward  from a prerequisite (a qualified audience). This is a
pro-spective finis.
Other verbs do not have any finis, or rather are their own finis : "to cut",
"to run", "to speak", etc.
Agent and state/process nouns may hold a finis too since they may be
considered the "frozen" unaspective form of an actor of a finitive process.
The prospective finis of  an instrument, a patient, an agent is the process
they incorporate.
But all nouns have a retrospective finis identified through the verb they
depend on. Tuna in "I fish tuna" has a retrospective finis as a usual fishing
prey (it's part of its potential sememe). "I fish cellular phones" shows
either that cellular phones may (rarely) share that finis, or "to fish"
switches of finis itself, or both (it's both, I think).
I know it's a pretty straightforward, simplistic, utilitaristic vision of
words, but I consider myself an ape thinking and speaking the world as goals
and tools (which you're not of course ;-)

Mathias