What would be minimum-standard gradable adjectives (GAs) in English are often expressed by verbal predicates formed with an aspectual marker ‑tei‑ in Japanese (Oda, 2008; Kubota, 2011; Sawada and Grano, 2011; Oshima et al., 2019). Despite their transparently verbal morphology, they have been assumed to have denotations of minimum-standard GAs, and based on this assumption, their interactions with measure phrases (MPs) have informed analyses of comparatives and differential MP constructions involving relative, canonical GAs (Kubota, 2011; Sawada and Grano, 2011). In this paper, I develop the first compositional analysis of minimum-standard-GA-like verbal ‑tei‑ predicates and the interpretations of co-occurring MPs. In doing so, I propose the first compositional account of a puzzling behaviour of a subset of ‑tei‑ predicates that crosscuts seemingly gradable and non-gradable ones, namely lack of entailment that an event described by the VP takes place. The lack of event entailment is analyzed with a modalized version of Kratzer's (2000) stativizing operator, and MP interpretations are analyzed without attributing degree semantics to the verbs, following Nakanishi's (2007) work on MPs occurring with other verbal predicates in the language.