A Cognitive Grammar account of the semantics of the English present progressive

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a unified account of the semantics of the English present progressive in the form of a semantic network, basing ourselves on the theoretical principles and analytical tools offered by the theory of Cognitive Grammar, as laid out by Langacker (1987, 1991). The core meaning of the English present progressive, we claim, is to indicateepistemic contingencyin the speaker's immediate reality. It thus contrasts with the simple present, which is associated with situations that are construed asstructurallybelonging to reality. On the basis of a study of the Santa Barbara Corpus of spoken American English, an inventory has been made of the more specific uses of the present progressive, temporal as well as modal. It is shown that each of these uses can be derived from this basic meaning of contingency in immediate reality via a set of conceptual branching principles, in interaction with elements in the context.

English Language Teachers’ Conceptions of Intercultural Empathy and Professional Identity: A Critical Discourse Analysis

“…The meaning and use of the verb "try" in the extract above also reinforces the emphasis on striving, effort and the desire to want to do something. While both tenses, as present tenses, locate a situation in the immediate reality of the speaker, the present simple form indicates something that the speaker perceives as always true while the present progressive expresses a view of the situation as a contingent part of the speaker's immediate reality (De Wit & Brisard, 2014). In this case, indicative of the temporality of striving towards the goal of being an empathic teacher as opposed to the certainty of being one.…”

The relation between aspect and inversion in English

“…the situation designated by the verb) that relates the figure and the ground; one could claim that given a certain ground and a certain figure, the relation between them emerges naturally. Such canonical events typically trigger simple tense forms, whereas the use of the progressive is linked to more phenomenal, incongruous and possibly surprising situations, as is demonstrated in various analyses (Calver 1946; Dowty 1975; Goldsmith & Woisetschlaeger 1982; Langacker 2001; De Wit & Brisard 2014). Cases of directional inversion involving a deictic effect may be regarded as extensions of the prototypical full-verb inversion construction.…”

A Corpus-based Study of I am thinking in Political Speeches

“…Williams (2001) also finds this 'susceptibility to change' component in the progressive. More recently, De Wit and Brisard (2014) have integrated all these partial descriptions into one unifying framework; they claim that all the uses of the present progressive arise from a contingent core meaning, 'epistemic contingency' or 'non-necessity in the speaker's conception of current reality', in contrast to the simple form, which denotes 'structural necessity' (De Wit & Brisard 2014, p. 50). Martínez Vázquez' s (2018) large corpus-based analysis of the progressive construction with love confirms that although the simple forms of love may occasionally denote non-structural situations, the progressive counterparts unquestionably designate phenomenal situations with variable interpretations arising in the context.…”

“…Given the rich versatility and dissimilar behaviour across genres reported on I think, a construction particularly common in political discourse, my aim here is to analyse the functions and distribution of its progressive form in political discourse, in which the simple form is particularly common, as compared with its use in nonspecialised discourse. Considering the contingent meaning supplied by the progressive (Goldsmith & Woisetschlaeger 1982;De Wit & Brisard 2014), which makes it highly interpretable in context, it is hypothesised that genre should play an important role in the use and distribution of IAT. In order to test this hypothesis, I will examine the functions of this construction in a multigeneric corpus of contemporary British English, before contrasting them with their use in British political speeches.…”