Languages & Linguistics
Progressive Aspect
The progressive aspect in grammar is used to indicate that an action is ongoing or in progress at a specific point in time. It is formed using a form of the verb "to be" followed by the present participle of the main verb. For example, in the sentence "She is studying," the progressive aspect indicates that the action of studying is currently happening.
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12 Key excerpts on "Progressive Aspect"
eBook - ePub- Geoffrey N. Leech(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Chapter 2 Progressive Aspect27 Progressive Aspect. Progressive Aspect REFERRING TO TEMPORARY HAPPENINGS : 28 temporariness; 29 duration; 30 limited duration; 31 not necessarily complete; 32 ‘temporal frame’ effect; 33 there is not always a ‘temporal frame’. CLASSES OF VERB WITH THE Progressive Aspect : 34; 35 A ‘Momentary Verbs’, 35 B ‘Transitional Event Verbs’; 36 C ‘Activity Verbs’, 36 D ‘Process Verbs’; 37 verbs normally incompatible with the Progressive; 37 E ‘Verbs of Inert Perception’, 37 F ‘Verbs of Inert Cognition’, 37 G ‘Verbs of Attitude’, 37 H ‘State Verbs of Having and Being’; 38 J ‘Verbs of Bodily Sensation’. special cases: 39; 40–1 verbs in class E ; 42–3 verbs in classes F & G ; 44–5 verbs in class H ; 46 further exceptions. Progressive Aspect – OTHER USES : 47; 48–50 habitual uses of Progressive; 51 future use; 52 ‘persistent’ or ‘continuous’ use.27The term PROGRESSIVE has frequently been used, and is used here, to designate those verb constructions in which the -ing form of the verb follows a form of the verb to be: (i)s working, (wi)ll be working, (ha)s been working, etc. The term is widely used because it suggests a happening ‘in progress,’ and because it avoids some misleading associations which belong to other terms commonly used by grammarians: ‘durative’, ‘temporary’, ‘continuous’, etc. In the most general terms, the Progressive ASPECT (as it is called) is said to give us an ‘inside view’ of a happening, rather than an ‘outside view’, seeing the happening as a single whole. Examples such as I was spending the day at home and I spent the day at home
- Cgnitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
A Theory of the Aspectual Progressive Michael J. Almeida Department of Computer Science The Pennsylvania State University Abstract The progressive construction in English has an unusually wide range of uses. In this paper, I propose a new theory of what is probably the most important use of the progressive – the aspectual progressive. It is the aspectual progressive which is being contrasted with the simple, i.e., nonprogressive, construction in the nonhabitual interpretation of such pairs of sentences as John was running at three o'clock versus John ran at three o'clock. The proposed theory is based on a particular analysis of the conceptualizations of events and situations commonly called the aspectual classes, and is able to account for the temporal properties of the progressive, for the “imperfective paradox” problem, and for the range of applicability of the aspectual progressive. INTRODUCTION The progressive construction in English has an unusually wide range of uses. In this paper, I will propose a new theory of what is probably the most important use of the progressive – the aspectual progressive. It is the aspectual progressive which is being contrasted with the simple, i.e., nonprogressive, construction in the nonhabitual interpretation of such pairs of sentences as John was running at three o'clock versus John ran al three o'clock, and Mary was speaking when I entered the room versus Mary spoke when I entered the room. In the first part of this paper, I present a survey and analysis of the conceptualizations of events and situations commonly called the aspectual classes. The precise explication of the (primarily temporal) properties of these different situation types forms a necessary background to my analysis of the progressive. In the second part of this paper, I describe and critique some previously proposed theories of the progressive, paying particular attention to the well-known theory of Vlach (1981)
eBook - PDF- Co Vet, Carl Vetters, Co Vet, Carl Vetters(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
It is lexically expressed and concerns the predicate and its arguments, in other words, the predicate frame. It can be equated with what is normally understood by Aktionsart. For Dik aspect is grammatically expressed aspectuality. He distinguishes different kinds of aspect, as indicated under (lb)-(ld). (Im)perfectivity he defines in the sense of Comrie (1976): a state of affairs is conceived as perfective if we present it as a complete, indivisible whole, as imperfective if we look at it as incomplete and from the inside. Phasal aspect is described in terms of the following schema (Dik 1989: 190): The English progressive tenses 163 What can be said on the basis of information available at some reference point t; about the occurrence of some SoA at some interval tj (where t, may or may not overlap with tj)? Dik distinguishes progressive and ingressive (inner phasal aspects) from prospective and perfect (outer phasal aspects); for all of these, however, he claims the necessity of an extra reference point. It is with this extra reference point for the progressive and ingressive that I have some difficulty. Whereas indeed an extra reference point is required for prospective and perfect (perfect aspect signals that some anterior state of affairs is viewed as having impact on/as continuing up to some reference point; prospective aspect views some posterior state of affairs as coming up from some earlier reference point), I do not see that it would be needed for ingressive or progressive. In my opinion, it is not more necessary in the case of progressive than for imperfective. Mini-mally, I would like to stress that the category progressive is closer to imper-fective than to prospective and perfect: indeed, there are reasons to believe that progressive may in certain cases be looked upon as a special manifes-tation of the category imperfective. This is the position which I will (tenta-tively) take up in connection with the English progressive forms in what follows.
eBook - ePub- Hana Filip(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Starting in the late sixties, there has been a number of studies on the semantics of the English Progressive Aspect that explicitly relate it to the classification of verbal predicates and sentences into eventuality types. Such studies have significantly contributed to our understanding of the Progressive Aspect and its interaction with predicates of different eventuality types in its scope. An adequate description of grammatical aspect must account for such systematic interactions. In this connection, I will also discuss how the perfective and imperfective verb forms in Czech map onto the eventuality types, states, processes and events.4.2 Aspect in English: The Progressive
In the next two sections 4.2.1 and 4.2.2 I will discuss two main approaches to the description of the English progressive: the tense-logical approach and the event-based approach. The main problem that these approaches address is the following: How is the meaning of a progressive sentence related to the meaning of the corresponding simple sentence? How is the meaning of PROG[ϕ] related to the meaning of ϕ? Matters are complicated by the fact that PROG[ϕ] does not have a uniform characterization, because its semantic properties vary according to the eventuality type of ϕ. For example, from a progressive sentence like (la) that contains a process predicate we can infer the proposition asserted by the corresponding simple sentence (1b):- (1) a. Max is swimming,
- b. Max has swum.
By contrast, this inference relation does not hold for progressive sentences based on event predicates and their non-progressive counterparts. For example, from (2a) we cannot infer (2b), provided (2a) has a single interpretation2 :- (2) a. Max is crossing a street,
- b. Max has crossed a street.
The intuition behind (2a) is that if Max is in the process of crossing a street then that crossing of a street by Max is not over. (2a) can be felicitously uttered in a situation in which Max is halfway across a street and a truck hits him, and consequently, Max will never cross the street. In other words, (2a) can be true and felicitously uttered, even though its non-progressive counterpart (2b) is false and will never be true. The progressive sentence (2a) is also compatible with a situation in which Max will eventually have crossed the street. The crucial point is that the utterance of (2a) does not commit its speaker to any particular outcome, because the actual crossing of a street is only a possible outcome of the event denoted by (2a). This roughly constitutes what Dowty (1977
eBook - PDFMarking Past Tense in Second Language Acquisition
A Theoretical Model
- Rafael Salaberry(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
More specifically, grammatical aspect is represented as a functional category AspP (Aspectual Phrase) that varies cross-linguistically (Giorgi and Pianesi, 1997; Schmitt, 2001; Slabakova, 2001; Tenny, 1994; Travis, 1994; Zagona, 1994). In turn, information about lexical aspect is located in a different position in the sentence structure (hierarchically lower than grammatical aspect). The lower functional cate-gory AspP [± telic] is located close to the lexical verb and carries information about lexical aspect In contrast, the higher functional category AspP [± perfective] conveys information about grammatical aspect Delimiting Lexical and Grammatical Aspect 87 The contrastive analysis of the representation of tense-aspect meanings in English and Spanish gives rise to specific hypotheses about L2 acquisition. In English, Giorgi and Pianesi propose that verbs are always perfective (denote bounded events) because 'this is the only way for them to get the correct categorical features and for allowing the derivation to converge' (p. 164). More specifically, given the fact that in English, verbs are not asso-ciated with visible markers of inflectional morphology, the way verbs [+V; -N] are disambiguated from nouns [-V; +N] is through the associa-tion with aspectual features. That is, English associates the feature value [+perfective] to all eventive predicates [+perfective; +V; -N]. In contrast, inn Romance languages (Italian is the example mentioned by Giorgi and Pianesi), the verb does not need to recourse to the aspectual feature of the verb (|>perfective]) because of Italian's rich inflectional morphology (unambiguous association with relevant categorial features). As an evidence for their proposal, Giorgi and Pianesi point out that in contrast with Romance languages, the English present tense does not have a continuous (imperfective) interpretation.
eBook - PDFCognitive Approaches to Pedagogical Grammar
A Volume in Honour of René Dirven
- Sabine De Knop, Teun De Rycker, Sabine De Knop, Teun De Rycker(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Aspectual concepts across languages 373 With respect to L2 learning, in Schmiedtová and Sahonenko (in press) we showed that advanced Czech and Russian learners of German adhere to their respective L1 preference. For example, Czech learners use the con-cept of perfectivity in L2 German although German does not have gram-matical aspect at all. The adherence to this concept becomes apparent in more frequent mentioning of endpoints in the form of local adjuncts (e.g., into the house) when retelling video clips depicting locomotions with ± endpoints. Even though German native speakers are also inclined to men-tion endpoints frequently (as pointed out in, e.g., von Stutterheim and Lambert 2005), the number of endpoints verbalized by L1 Czech speakers of German exceeds the average for German native speakers. This is a rele-vant finding because it illustrates that patterns found for native speakers for event depiction in their native language still drive the perspectivization in L2 production. This important issue presents a considerable challenge to language teachers, since, for learners, being aware of the meanings of vari-ous aspectual categories is a good starting point for achieving native-like competence in a second language. 3.2. Progressive in English and Dutch: grammaticalization and conceptual structure This part of the paper is devoted to the Dutch language. This is because in Dutch the progressive marker aan het + V-INF zijn is currently being grammaticalized (Flecken 2006). We are aware that a truly grammatical-ized aspectual marker is morphological in nature and that the Dutch marker is still a periphrastic construction. However, we speculate that in the course of the grammaticalization process it will be reduced to a verbal morpheme. This seems to be already noticeable when considering native speakers’ shortened pronunciation of this construction.
eBook - PDF- F.R. Palmer(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Chapter 4 Aspect Although it can be argued that there is a basic use of the progressive, there are some problems with its use to refer to habitual and future actions and with its occurrence with certain ('non-progressive') verbs. There is also a need to discuss the combination of aspect and phase. 4.1 Duration It has already been suggested (3.1.3) that the progressive indi-cates action in progress, ie activity continuing throughout a period of time and that in that sense it is durational; in contrast, the non-progressive merely reports the action. 4. 1. 1 Points of time The simplest and clearest use of the progressive is when it is used to indicate activity going on at a point of time, ie both before and after it. This explains its use in the present where the activity clearly overlaps 'now': Please be quiet, I'm reading. The speaker has been reading and intends to continue. There is a similar use in the past tense, but the point of time is then usually indicated and there is, as a result, a clear contrast with the non-progressive, which would usually indicate that the action followed the time indicated, as in: When I saw him, he was running away. When I saw him, he ran away. DURATION 55 In the second the act of running away was preceded by (and probably an effect of) my seeing him. Simultaneity is possible, however, as in: As the clock struck ten, he died. He died at ten o'clock. The non-progressive specifically excludes overlap, as is shown where a number of actions are reported: When I arrived, he shouted three times. All three shouts followed my arrival. In fact, English has no simple way of showing that there were three shouts and that the shouting both preceded and followed my arrival. If the meaning of the lexical verb itself includes a sense of duration, the non-progressive may be used even if there clearly is some duration: I read all morning. I worked for a long time. He slept all night. Contrasted with these are: I was reading at ten.
eBook - PDFMastering English
An Advanced Grammar for Non-native and Native Speakers
- Carl Bache, Niels Davidsen-Nielsen(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The further away a choice is from the first choice, the weaker and the more sporadic these implications become, and the more other factors become important, such as actionality and aspect, which affect the perfect/nonperfect and especially the progressive/nonprogressive opposi-tions. We conclude this section by offering an overview of some of the character-istic aspectual and actional meanings associated with pairs of nonprogressive and progressive forms: 302 Verbals Nonprogressive <-> Aspect external focus <-> Progressive internal focus Action stative <-> punctual <— > punctual <-> telic <-> self-contained <-> dynamic iterative directed directed self-contained Examples He speaks like a professional He is speaking like a professional A door slammed behind him A door was slamming behind him She caught up with the others She was catching up with the others She built a new garden shed She was building a new garden shed They walked along the beach They were walking along the beach 9.6.7. Present and past progressive forms In using the present progressive the speaker instructs the hearer to think of present time and then look at a simultaneously progressing situation. The meaning of the present progressive is thus 'It applies now that a situation is simultaneous and in progress'. This can be expressed by the notation [Present [progressing [situation]]] and illustrated by an example like Federal authorities are investigating allegations of currency violations. As pointed out in section 9.6.2, the simple present is often used to express habitual meaning (including universal conditions, personal habits and ability). In such cases the hearer is instructed to think of the world now but clearly not to view a dynamic situation as taking place simultaneously with the moment of speech. For this purpose the speaker must use the present progressive, and if he chooses to do so the habitual meaning disappears: (la) The sun sets in the west.
eBook - ePubThe Grammaticalization of Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality
A Functional Perspective
- Kees Hengeveld, Heiko Narrog, Hella Olbertz, Kees Hengeveld, Heiko Narrog, Hella Olbertz(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Storms (1964: 62) suggests that “the opposition between progressive vs. non-progressive can quite generally be explained as one of subjectivity vs. objectivity and the use of progressive or simple form will vary according to the emotional make-up of the speaker […], to momentary influences and momentary fluctuations.” The emotional coloring of the progressive is obvious in combination with adverbs of frequency (e.g hamaš ‘always’, modâm ‘all the time’), and with downtoners (e.g faqat ‘just’) where we can observe a semantic prosody, either positive or negative. However, in our opinion, even in the absence of such adverbs, the speaking subject’s stance is directly expressed through the periphrastic progressive, while the simple form is fully conventionalized and does not express the speaker’s negative or positive attitude towards a proposition. The invited inferences of irritation, surprise and politeness are illustrated in (38), (39), and (40), respectively: Having exemplified the subjective meanings of the Progressive Aspect here, let us now turn to the next step in the grammaticalization chain with another aspectual meaning. Starting from the new meaning of ongoingness of a durative situation, the grammaticalized construction has also metonymically acquired the meaning of prospectiveness when applied to punctual achievement situations. As was mentioned before, we consider this meaning as a non-core meaning of the Progressive Aspect. Again, we suggest that metaphor is not the essential mechanism of change at work, as the new function emerges through association in the flow of speech, and is entirely context-dependent. 4 The emergence of the prospective aspect marker in Persian According to Vendler (1957: 147), there are four classes of eventuality. Among these four classes, achievements are telic but unlike accomplishments do not mark duration
eBook - PDF- Bob Morris Jones(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Chapter 8 Progressive Aspect 8.1 Introduction The aim of this chapter is to explain the semantics of the progressive and non-Progressive Aspects in informal Welsh. A precise descriptive account is complex to present due to the amount of data which is needed to make bal-anced comparisons. These data involve syntactic and semantic contexts which we shall outline before presenting the details of the analysis. 8.1.1 The data The syntactic characteristics of the progressive and non-progressive are outlined in 1.3.1. A Progressive Aspect phrase is made up of the aspect marker yn and a non-finite verb such as siarad ‘talk’, giving yn siarad ‘talking’. Like the perfect aspect, the Progressive Aspect can occur in var i-ous syntactic contexts, but to discuss the progressive, compound tense pat-terns are divided into non-perfect and perfect: – non-perfect compound tense patterns and simple finite verbs; – perfect compound tense patterns; – periphrastic patterns with an inflected modal verb; – non-finite clauses; – small clauses; – absolute clauses. The contrast of non-perfect compound tense patterns and simple finite verbs figure prominently in discussions of the Progressive Aspect. We shall use the label other patterns to refer collectively to the remaining contexts. As outlined in 3.1 and 4.1.1, in northern dialects, in particular, a periphras-tic pattern containing the auxiliary verbs gwneud ‘do’ or ddaru is an alter-native to a simple finite verb. For economy, simple verbs are mainly illus-trated in the examples. However, progressive:non-progressive contrasts do not occur in all these syntactic contexts. The availability of non-progressives is reduced by gaps and preferences or interchangeability. Introduction 249 Non-progressive gaps are caused by inflectional restrictions on simple finite verbs (as outlined in 1.2 and chapter 3).
eBook - PDF- Östen Dahl(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Ibero-Romance St-PROG and English PROG embrace stages (iii) and (iv), for they may occur both in prototypically focalized contexts (cf. (4–5) above), and in durative contexts such as those exemplified in (6) and in Section 3. This shows that, in principle, St-PROG is not restricted to truly imperfective situations, although it shows a striking predilection for such contexts. In fact, as suggested by Squartini (1998), in the early stages of development the component which is most involved 576 Pier Marco Bertinetto Table 2. Diachronic development of progressive constructions in Romance (from actionality to aspect) (i) pure locativity stative, durative (ex.: the meaning to be observed in some Latin examples) (ii) progressivity I residually locative, durative, accessible to perfective aspect (ex.: PROG periphrases based on the verb ‘come’, which preserve some kind of deictic orientation) (iii) progressivity II durative, accessible to perfective aspect (ex.: PROG periphrases based on the verb ‘go’) (iv) progressivity III focalized, strictly imperfective (ex.: Modern Italian “ stare Gerund”) (v) pure imperfectivity loss of the progressive character (ex.: possibly to be observed on some non-standard vari-eties of Latin American Spanish) appears to be actionality, rather than aspect proper. This also transpires through the preference for atelic predicates (with the obvious restriction concerning stative verbs) in sentences such as (16) where, in the relevant languages, St-PROG is likely to be used to express a purely durative situation. The extent to which these properties are manifested varies from language to lan-guage. As we observed, some varieties of spoken (particularly Latin American) Spanish allow for an extreme behaviour, but on the whole Standard Spanish does not seem to be as liberal as English and Portuguese (or as some colloquial varieties of Italian). Obviously, more research is needed to ascertain this.
eBook - PDF- Paul Portner, Klaus Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn, Paul Portner, Klaus Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589443-010 Paul Portner 10 Perfect and progressive 1 Introduction 313 2 The perfect 313 3 The progressive 342 4 References 364 Abstract: This article surveys the major approaches to the semantics of the perfect and progressive. While it may not seem difficult to describe the meaning of these constructions informally, both present empirical puzzles, within and across lan-guages, which show that initial descriptions do not do justice to their meanings. As a result, a range of analyses of the perfect and progressive have been devel-oped. These analyses are important not only in their roles as attempts to formalize the meaning of the construction in question, but also because they have devel-oped tools which have proven fruitful in other areas of linguistic theory. 1 Introduction This article discusses two aspectual constructions which are prominent in English and many other languages, and which have received a great deal of attention within semantic theory. They are worth studying because they are of linguistic interest in their own right (as are the prominent constructions of any language) and more importantly because of the in-depth research they have trig-gered. We have learned a great deal about the temporal semantics, event seman-tics, modal semantics, and various other issues, from the progressive and the perfect. 2 The perfect The perfect is a grammatical construction which is built from a participial verb phrase and an auxiliary, and which indicates temporal anteriority (roughly, past-ness) as part of its meaning. Paul Portner, Washington, DC, USA 314 Paul Portner (1) Ben has fallen asleep. The most basic goal of theories of the perfect is an analysis of the type of anteri-ority it indicates. It is not simply the kind of past meaning expressed by the past tense, as we can see in English from the contrast in (2): (2) a. *Ben has fallen asleep yesterday afternoon. b. Ben fell asleep yesterday afternoon.
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