Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

The English progressive 71
PROG constructions include, in one way or another, a locative morpheme. This
may consist for instance of an auxiliary verb indicating existence or position
(as in virtually every European PROG device), of an explicit marker of locativity
(like the inessive case in Finnish PROG), or of a combination of more than one
such morphemes (as again in Finnish PROG, which combines both of the above
features). (Bertinetto et al. 2000: 532)
Bertinetto et al. give no concrete examples of locative source constructions,
but I give some examples in (1) below of constructions which are normally assumed
to be locative. The examples here all involve a locative preposition. This is a
construction type which is said by Comrie (1976: 98–103) to be very common.
(1) a. German:
Der Mann ist am/beim Lesen.
the man is at-the reading
b. Dutch:
De man is aan het lezen.
the man is at the reading
“The man is reading.”
c. Middle English:
‘Palmer’, a sede, ‘whar is þe king?’
‘Sire!’ a seide, ‘an honting Wiþ kinges fifteen.’
(The Romance of Sir Beues of Hamtoun;
cf. de Groot 2007 for publication data.)
The example in (1c) is an example of the well-known be on hunting construction.
It is this construction which is normally taken to be the source construction
in accounts that argue in favour of a locative origin for the English progressive
(e.g., Jespersen 1924: 278; Dal 1952; Braaten 1967, and others; see the discussion
in Núñez-Pertejo 2004: 113–118). 3 However, Bertinetto et al. apparently assume
that the beon/wesan + Vende construction was originally locative, as we will see in
section 4.2.
Durative progressives are defined in the following way:
‘Durative’ progressive constructions [. . .], i.e., those that are evaluated relative to
a larger interval of time. [. . .] the actual duration of the event remains indeterminate.
Even when a durative temporal adverbial is present, this does not delimit the
event but merely yields a vantage point from which the situation is observed.
(Bertinetto et al. 2000: 527)
3. De Groot (2007) also assumes that the English progressive goes back to the be on hunting
construction. However, he regards the original construction as an absentive construction, which
developed into a progressive construction because the absentive and the progressive partially
overlap semantically.