The meaning of the English present participle

Abstract

While earlier descriptions of the English present participle have tended to be too general or too exclusively focused on its progressive meaning, this article aims to present an account of the meanings of the English present participle that captures their full richness. It starts from the observation that many (though not all) present participle clauses/phrases are paradigmatically related to adjectival phrases, as manifested in their distributional properties (e.g. a challenging year, those living alone). The article analyses the semantic effects that arise from the tension between the verbal semantics of the participial stem and the adjectival semantics of the syntactic slot. These effects involve accommodation of the verbal situation to the requirement that a situation is represented as time-stable and as simultaneous to some contextually given reference time. The progressive meaning is one such semantic effect, but participles may also assume iterative, habitual or gnomic readings. Some construction-specific semantic extensions of this adjectival template are identified and a tentative explanation is offered for them. Those constructions where the present participle has lost its semantic association with adjective phrases, such as the progressive construction and integrated participle clauses, are shown to display loosening or specialization of semantic constraints.

Grammaticalization by changing co-text frequencies, or why [BE Ving] became the ‘progressive’

“…It is fully stative in that all phases of the situation are identical . As such, the participle functions similarly to a predicative adjective (see De Smet & Heyvaert 2011 for synchronic evidence). In (10), its adjectival status is clear because of the adjectival modifier very .…”

Like a rolling stone: the changing use of English premodifying present participles

“…The distinction is a manifestation of the contrast between stage-level and individual level predication (Carlson 1977;Kratzer 1995). An attributed characteristic can be time-stable all through the existence of its nominal referent, as in (6a), or just for the duration of (at least) the situation in which the nominal referent figures, as in (6b) The classification of De Smet & Heyvaert (2011) outlines the various ways this basic distinction can play out in the aspectual readings assigned to present participles in context. But in itself the present participle underspecifies these interpretative possibilities, just as it underspecifies the distinction between a permanent or temporary characteristic.…”

Category change in the English gerund

“…Characteristics (iii) and (iv), inspired by the constructionist idea of language as a network of connected constructions, can help to explain why the verbal gerund seems to simultaneously drift away from and again partake in the deictic behaviour of the NP category. 4 Despite the fact that that gerundive and participial ing-forms cannot be distinguished on semantic grounds (De Smet, 2010Smet, , p. 1169Smet, -1171De Smet & Heyvaert, 2011), and that gerunds and participles engage in a diachronic trend of becoming less distinctive over time (De Smet, 2010, p. 1171-1182, De Smet (2010) convincingly points out that the data do not straightforwardly support the claim that language users no longer distinguish gerunds from participles. First, Huddleston & Pullum's claim that gerunds and participles are morphologically identical "only fully holds for standard noncolloquial written English" (De Smet, 2010Smet, , p. 1164, since in nonstandard varieties of English, language users distinguish between an /in/-and /iŋ/-realization of the (ING)-morpheme in a way that largely coincides with the gerund-participle divide.…”