Basic English Syntax with Exercises

progressive aspect

1.3.4.1 Verbs

The English verb has other inflectional forms expressing things other than tense. For example there are perfect and progressive aspectual forms:

1.3.4.1 Verbs

While tense typically places an event in time, aspect refers to the process of the event itself: whether it has stopped or is still going on, for example. Perfect aspect often denotes that an event has finished while progressive denotes that it is still continuing:

1.3.4.1 Verbs

The progressive aspect is fortunately more regular and, in fact, it is always formed by adding ing to the stem. Finally, verbs have a passive form as well. This is always identical to the perfective however:

1.3.4.1 Verbs

To summarise, there are five forms in which an English verb can appear: the base form (uninflected), the past tense form, the third person singular present form, the perfective (and passive) form and the progressive fo

1.3.4.4 Prepositions

There are a small number of exceptions to these observations. For example inner might be claimed to be a comparative form of in, ins is a possible plural (as in ins and outs) and toing is a progressive based on the preposition to (as in toing and froing). But it is obvious that in such cases the stem is not used as a preposition, but as a member of the appropriate category: in in ins is a noun, not a preposition.

1.3.5.1 Inflections

We need to distinguish between two groups of auxiliary verb, however. (133a) and (133b) involve aspectual auxiliaries (perfective and progressive respectively). (133c) concerns a modal auxiliary. These two types of auxiliaries differ not only in their semantic content, but also in their syntactic behaviour. For example, while modal auxiliaries are in complementary distribution with one another (there can only ever be one per clause), they are not in complementary distribution with the aspectuals. The aspectual auxiliaries are also not in complementary distribution with each other:

1.3.6 Functionally underspecified categories

This would suggest that they are not categorised in the same way as inflections. They appear to be verbal elements as they inflect for almost the same set of things that verbs do (perfective have inflects for tense (has/had), progressive be inflects for tense (is/was) and perfect aspect (been) and passive be inflects for tense (is/was), perfect aspect (been) and progressive aspect (being)). However, they are clearly not thematic elements in that they play no role in the thematic interpretation of the sentence. Aspectual auxiliaries therefore share properties with verbs and inflections, but they cannot be categorised as either. We can capture this situation if, like verbs and inflections, we categorise aspectuals as [–N, +V] elements, but simply leave the [±F] feature undefined. In common with inflections, aspectual auxiliaries also take only verbal complements and they never precede any other category. However, they may precede either verbs or other aspectual auxiliaries:

5.1 Event Structure and Aspect

Turning now to aspect. Again this is a semantic property of verbs which has to do with the process involved and its relationship to the progression of time. This is not tense, however, which situates an event at a particular place in time with respect to some other point, the time at which a sentence is uttered, for example. With aspect time is important with respect to the internal aspects of the event itself. For example, the end point of the event seen with respect to its starting point and what goes on between the two. It is important to distinguish between two types of aspect, one which is internal to the meaning of the verb, which we might refer to as lexical aspect, and one which is to do with the interpretation of a particular event described by a sentence, which we call grammatical aspect. Lexical aspect is also sometimes called aktionsart.

5.1 Event Structure and Aspect

Although the encoding of grammatical aspect in English is complex, the forms be + Ving and have + Ven are often called the progressive and perfective forms to reflect the kind of distinction made in (6). That things are not so simple, however, can be seen from the following:

5.1 Event Structure and Aspect

Although (7a) has the verb in its progressive form, the event described is clearly completed and the person has stopped living in Paris. (7b) on the other hand is in the perfective form, but the event is not complete: the person is still living in Paris at the time the sentence is uttered.

5.3.1 The auxiliary as a dummy

What is the function of the auxiliary in these sentences? Note that the auxiliary bears some morpheme: in (162a) the tense, in (162b) the ing associated with the progressive auxiliary and in (162c) the tense on the first passive auxiliary and the en associated with the perfective have on the second. In these examples, the main verb cannot bear these morphemes for the simple reason that it is already bearing the passive morpheme and it seems a basic principle of English morphology that no word can bear more than one overt inflectional morpheme:

6.2.1 Inserting auxiliaries into I

In both of these examples, the verb moves from the V position to support the aspectual morphemes. As a consequence of English stems being unable to support more than one overt morpheme, the verb cannot move further. As the inflection is a bound morpheme it needs supporting and in this case the auxiliaries are inserted directly into the inflectional slot. Note that which auxiliary is used depends on the aspectual element heading the vP complement of the inflectional element. A perfective aspectual morpheme determines the supporting auxiliary to be have while the progressive morpheme determines the supporting auxiliary to be be. With a slightly more complex example, we see that this is a very general process:

6.2.1 Inserting auxiliaries into I

In this case there are two aspectual morphemes as well as the inflection to be supported. The verb moves to the lowest one and cannot move further. Therefore two auxiliaries are inserted: be, determined by the progressive, is inserted onto the perfective morpheme which takes the phrase headed by ing as its complement, and have, determined by the perfective, is inserted onto the tense morpheme (in this case null) which takes the phrase headed by the perfective morpheme as its complement.