The English Progressive and Markedness. This paper proposes that the English progressive has a semantically marked property of limited duration of situation, whereas the simple tense has a semantically unmarked property of permanent state of affairs, ...
The English Progressive and Markedness. This paper proposes that the English progressive has a semantically marked property of limited duration of situation, whereas the simple tense has a semantically unmarked property of permanent state of affairs, and that this semantics uniformly underlies a variety of apparently disparate readings of the progressive. For the most part, whereas the progressive of stative verbs has limited duration of macro situation (i.e. destativization), that of momentaneous event verbs has limited duration of micro situation (i.e. detelicization) and that of all the other verbs has limited duration of changeable situation. These three are basic meanings of the progressive. The progressive, in addition, has extended meanings such as limited duration of pre-arranged situation and that of disagreeable situation.