ENGLISH PROGRESSIVE ASPECT: TRENDS, USES AND SERBIAN TRANSLATION EQUIVALENTS

Abstract

English progressive aspect has been a frequent topic of research from different standpoints, especially its usage and its status as a tense or aspect. Some recent studies pointed to the fact that the use of progressive has been changing over the decades, showing differences in frequency, meanings and implications. Therefore, this paper compares the approach to progressive in selected English grammars with the use of progressive in a contemporary literary corpus. Namely, the first part of the paper presents standpoints from the English grammar books that progressive offers a temporal frame for another situation, that it may denote duration, temporariness, incompletion, emotionally coloured tone etc. The central part of the paper discusses these standpoints and relates them to the uses of progressive aspect (present, present perfect, past, past perfect and future progressive) in the contemporary novel Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. The primary goal of this empirical research is to gain insight into the current tendencies related to the use of progressive aspect in the literary style, for instance, the statistical data about the abovementioned meanings; the second goal is to check the feature of stativity and the uses of stative verbs in the progressive aspect in the corpus. Finally, the paper discusses the Serbian translation equivalents of the excerpted English examples because they reflect the uses of the English progressive and may help clarify them