The BE + -ING form: Progressive aspect and metonymy

Abstract

Adamczewski claims that relying on semantic criteria alone leads to an almost endless list of unrelated senses and exceptions. Mere description, he argues, should not be the ultimate goal of linguistics. What the linguist must aim at, he suggests, is an explicative account of grammatical phenomena. Moreover, he points out that some occurrences of BE +-ING, though grammatical and acceptable, invalidate descriptions based on aspectuality. Take, for instance, example (1). (1) So when you vote for a candidate, you are voting also to endorse the whole system http://www.progress.org/archive/fold128.htm There seems indeed to be no obvious reason why BE +-ING is used in the second clause, given that, in the first clause, the same verb occurs in the Simple Present. According to Adamczewski, who analyses similar examples, BE functions as a relator between the subject and a VP marked as "given" or "thematic" by the-ING morpheme 1. It means that the speaker uses BE +-ING not to assert that the verbal happening is unfolding (it is not) but to provide further information about a predicate the hearer has already processed, given that it has just been mentioned. Thus, (1) conveys the speaker's personal comment on the implications of the event <vote for a candidate>. Example (2) is another problem case for upholders of the aspectual theory. (2) 'The house is a bit big for you now, isn't it?' He said.'Don't start on me, for the love of God. Tess is always nagging me to sell up and move into a flat. (David Lodge, Paradise News) 10 First, the definite article in the NP the man suggests that the VP does not impart new information. Bobby had already seen the man before-hence the nominalization of the VP. Again, the BE +-ING form enables the speaker to draw on already processed information and to make a comment on it. It is not that Bobby saw the man that matters, but that he now saw him in a different way, as he really was. Adamczewski's analysis is

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

“…Recognizing the deficiencies of purely aspecto-temporal accounts of the English progressive, he searches for the basic criterion for using this grammatical construction OUTSIDE the realm of semantics, arguing that the be+-ing form functions as a kind of meta-operator at the discourse level, indicating that a situation is known to the speaker and hearer (i.e., the situation constitutes the theme of the utterance). However, his analysis of the progressive as a meta-operator which conveys given information does not hold for all its uses -as we will see, for instance, the progressive is frequently employed to introduce new situations that are surprising to the speaker -and it does not provide a distinctive feature that sets the present progressive apart from the simple present (which can also be used to refer to known information, as noted by, for instance, Furmaniak 2005). Moreover, Adamczewski's non-semantic analysis of a grammatical form is both undesirable and unnecessary given a cognitivist approach to language and semantics (see Section 3 below), as we will try to show in this paper.…”

La nature du procès dans les énoncés en BE + -ING

“…Face au constat selon lequel certains verbes s'emploient difficilement avec BE + -ING, plusieurs approches semblent possibles : faire des listes d'exceptions ; faire apparaître que dans tous les énoncés en BE + -ING, les procès relèvent du type processus (Furmaniak, 2005), ou au contraire faire apparaître la nature stative des procès en BE + -ING, justifiant ainsi la moindre fréquence de certains procès avec BE + -ING. C'est cette dernière hypothèse que nous privilégions.…”

Aspect as a communicative category. Evidence from English, Russian and French

“…It is only found among linguists who work with formal descriptions trying to define the precise conditions under which a progressive sentence or a simple sentence can be truthfully used. The group includes, among others, Bennett and Partee (1972), Dowty (1977), Freed (1979), Saurer (1984, Mourelatos (1981), Mufwene (1984), Vlach (1981), Hinrichs (1986, Landman (1992), Asher (1992), Verkuyl (1993), Parsons (1989), Glasbey (1996, Furmaniak 2005, Wulf 2009, Altshuler 2012, Varasdi 2010, Mayerhofer 2014, Silk 2014 The fourth group consists of a handful of scholars who all agree that the English progressive is not confined to the notion of aspect, but also involves modality. In this way the group resembles the abovementioned one.…”