The progressive and the structure of events

Abstract

In the analysis of the progressive proposed in the paper, two notions play a crucial role. On the one hand, since the same event can be ‘embedded’ into several possible developments that are relevant to the truth-conditions of the progressive, a first task of the analysis is to account for the part-of relation which connects an event with its possible continuations. On the other hand, this kind of connection is largely dependent on contextual factors, and a second task of the paper is to analyze this notion of context both in terms of events in the world (the ‘concomitant facts’ selected as relevant) and in terms of the situation of the discourse (the conversational background that makes those facts relevant). After presenting, in section 2, the so-called imperfective paradox, in section 3, I address a problem of ambiguity engendered by the underdetermination of the data whilst a related issue is discussed in section 4. The new examples analyzed in this section are an interesting illustration of the intensional character of the progressive. In section 5, I discuss the role of mereological relations in the semantics of the progressive, whilst in section 6, I take into consideration the use of this aspectual form in connection withimprobable courses of events. In the final sections, all these problems are considered from the point of view of asemantics for the progressive in which a ‘mereological’ analysis of eventualities (based on the part-of relation) is combined with a contextualist approach.