The English progressive as picture description

Abstract

It is a tradition in linguistics to distinguish standard uses and non-standard uses of the English progressive aspect. Although this distinction is important and should be explained by any theory, I would like to question the appropriateness of taking one's starting point in standard uses which, as an inevitable consequence of the approach itself, are described as following directly from the theory and then proceed to the data left to one side in advance, i.e. to the non-standard uses, which are subsequently described in a non-straightforward way. My descriptive strategy takes its point of departure in contrasts posited on the basis of data from child language acquisition. Research shows that English children combine NON-ING-forms with present tense forms of state verbs and ING-forms with present tense forms of activity verbs. This initial system of what I propose to call simplex verbs is named the basic system, which, it is argued, is founded on the perceptual notion of stable and unstable pictures. Later the English child extends the basic system by linking ING-forms to the presentation of a picture of a situation and NON-ING-forms to the presentation of an idea of a situation, thereby creating an extended system of both simplex and so-called complex verbs, where the traditionally recognized standard and non-standarduses are found. In short, the progressive aspect presents the situation named by a verb as being a property of a picture, whereas the non-progressive aspect presents the same situation as being a property of a person or of a thing. From a pragmatic point of view, the former can be said to describe a situation, while the latter can be said to characterize a person or a thing. The theory that results from this strategy diverges from what a purely structural point of view would yield, but, what is more crucial, it is made up of a uniform description of not only subtypes of various context-bound aspect distinctions recognized elsewhere in the literature, but also of otherwise disparate data types left unexplained by more traditional theories. At the same time, the approach itself suggests that there must be what seems to be an important typological contrast between, on the one hand, English aspect that is acquired in the present tense of simplex verbs and, on the other hand, Russian aspect that is acquired in the past tense of complex verbs. The paper is divided into two major parts. The first part (section l– 3) is concerned with verb and situation typology and the second part (section 4–7) with the progressive aspect. Both have an identical structure: first a short examination of existing theories, then criticism, and finally the theory to he proposed. It is important for the reader to bear this overall structure in mind, because concepts which at first seem to be left undefined or only slightly touched upon in the first sections will be defined and dealt with in detail in the final ones.