The English Progressive: Beyond an Aspectual-Temporal Analysis

Abstract

There are two main approaches to formally accounting for the semantics of the English progressive. One treats the progressive as an intensional modal-temporal operator (Dowty 1977), whilst the other, considers the construction to be an extensional predicate modifier (Parsons 1990). Both approaches are not without problems, and this paper, through a study of the different usage types of the progressive, aims to contribute some insight into how these problems can be accounted for. Finally, suggestions for what should constitute the core meaning of the progressive will be given, in hopes that this will inform the formal anal ysis of the construction.