Re: [tied] Lexically Specified Aspect in English?

On 2006-12-31 22:34, Richard Wordingham wrote:

> I've seen it effectively claimed as such, for 'stative verbs', which
> may be defined as verbs that (almost) lack progressive forms.
> Examples are 'own' and 'be'. My personal preference is to say that
> the progressive is largely lacking in these verbs because it adds
> nothing to the meaning, so unless the construction requires a
> progressive it will not be used. My favorite example here is that 'be
> good' in the sense of 'behave oneself' does have a progressive form.
> However, I am not sure that there is a test to distinguish the two
> positions, and it may well be that the existence or otherwise of
> lexical markings for such a class varies from person to person.

In PIE the classification of verb roots into perfective and imperfective
was both unambiguous and -- at least partly -- arbitrary, not unlike the
assignment of grammatical gender in a language like French. For example,
just as there's no synchronic reason for Fr. table to be feminine,
there's nothing inherently imperfective about the semantics of a verb
like *gWHen- 'strike, kill'. Still, we have *gWHén-ti and no *é gWHent.

Another example of odd behaviour in an English stative verb is <want>.
The progressive form is rare except in the perfect: "I've been wanting
to meet you" is more frequent in current usage than "I've wanted to meet
you", judging from the number of Google hits for both.

Piotr