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

72 Kristin Killie
Examples of the durative progressive are provided by the parallel examples in (2):
(2) a. English:
[Yesterday, during my sleep], Ann was playing for two hours all by herself.
b. Catalan: . . .
l’Anna va estar jugant tota sola durant dues hore.
c. Portugese:
. . . A Ana esteve a jogar sozina durante dos horas.
(from Bertinetto 2000: 571)
Focalized progressives are defined as follows:
‘Focalized’ progressive constructions [. . .], i.e., those expressing the notion of an
event viewed as going on at a single point in time, here called ‘focalization point’.
The focalization point may be overtly expressed in the sentence, or else it may be
recovered from the context, being the object of a presupposition. Needless to say,
the focalization point does not exhaustively localize the event; it simply indicates
a point in time overlapping the progressive event, while the actual duration of the
latter remains indeterminate. (Bertinetto et al. 2000: 527)
One type of focalized progressive is the ‘frame construction’, in which the
event denoted by the progressive verb functions as a background event to an event
expressed by a non-progressive verb form (Bertinetto 2000: 565). Examples are
given in the parallel examples in (3).
(3) a. English:
when John came, Ann was still working.
b. Catalan:
quan en Joan va venir, l’Anna encara estava treballant.
c. Portugese:
quando o João chegou, a Ana ainda estava a trabalhar.
(from Bertinetto 2000: 564–565)
According to Jespersen (1909–1949: 178–180), the frame construction represents
the prototypical use of the progressive in Modern English. Below we will see
that this use of the progressive was not very frequent in earlier English.
What durative and focalized progressives have in common is that they both
view events as unbounded, i.e., it is the middle of the event which is in focus, while
the beginning and end of the event are not; in other words, the temporal boundaries
of the event are blurred. By contrast, a bounded event is an event which is
perceived as a whole, i.e., including temporal boundaries. As we will see below,
earlier English made extensive use of the progressive in contexts in which Modern
English requires a non-progressive form because the event in question is perceived
as clearly bounded.