The Semantics of the Progressive in English

Abstract

This paper presents a modal-based semantic treatment of the progressive in which phenomena such as the imperfective paradox, the interruption problem, and the multiple choice paradox that have been noted in the semantic literature of the progressive can be accounted for in a unified way. Unlike the present study, the previous analyses propose their own solutions to each one of the phenomena, not all of them simultaneously. In this respect, the proposal made in this paper can be viewed as handling the semantics of the progressive in a more rigorous and elegant way.