Stative verbs in the progressive aspect: A study of semantic, pragmatic, syntactic and discourse patterns.

摘要

English as a Second Language textbooks and grammar references proscribe the use of stative verbs in the BE + ing progressive form. They often claim that utterances such as "I'm not understanding this" or "Are you wanting tea, or coffee ... ?" are unacceptable in standard American English, yet these utterances are frequently used by educated, native speakers in formal and informal discourse, in public and in private. This study documents from a semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and discourse perspective, how and why native speakers use stative verbs with their stative meanings in the progressive form today, in direct contradiction to the rule prohibiting this usage.; An observational approach was used to collect data from many sources, without interference or elicitation from the researcher. The final corpus contained 715 progressive stative examples from 14 commonly proscribed stative verbs falling into three semantic categories: sense, emotion, and cognition. Data were limited to the speech and writing of adult native speakers using a standard American dialect.; Semantically, while progressive statives emphasize the episodic nature of an activity, they also convey greater vividness, intensity, and involvement. Syntactically, global patterns are observable with respect to tense, aspect, and modal use. Individual usage patterns are more common with respect to adverbial co-occurrence and the use of pseudo-cleft constructions. Pragmatically, progressive statives convey politeness in the form of tentativeness, softening, and a desire for harmony. Discourse patterns show that when non-stative verbs form a progressive pattern, stative verbs are included. Some progressive statives even form their own discourse patterns (e.g., like, love).; Progressive statives are not errors. Analysis shows that when a choice between simple and progressive forms is possible, native speakers choose the progressive for reasons listed above. More compelling, however, is that in many contexts, the progressive appears to be the only acceptable form. This implies that the traditional definition of a stative verb as unable to take the BE + ing progressive is incorrect.; Finally, use of progressive statives may represent a language change in progress, not only of a syntactic nature, but also semantically as a change in the conceptualization of these verbs from "stative" to more "dynamic."