Towards an analysis of the progressive

Abstract

1.PreliminariesIn an attempt to understand the philosophical, linguistic and logicalproblems of the progressive tense, it may be valuable to start with a detailedanalysis of actions, and the verbs relating to them. The loss of generality ofsuch an analysis may perhaps be excused if it helps shed some light on themain issues, even if it does not provide answers to all questions on thesubject. The issues that are approached in this paper are: (i) to define aformal language suitable for analysing certain aspects of action sentences,(ii) to outline a theory of action with sufficient precision to formulateplausible truth-conditions for action sentences in the progressive tense, and(iii) to provide a partial analysis of tenses that satisfy basic inferentialpatterns for action sentences.The main work of this paper is to formulate a theory of actions preciselyenough to enable us to construct a simple formal language in which simpleassertions about actions can be given precise truth-conditions. This meansthat a number of issues relating mainly to action theory will have to beaddressed. Despite this, many, if not most, issues relating to problems inthe theory of actions will have to be ignored, and so the theory, aspresented, will have to be viewed as a rough sketch.The sentences discussed here are primarily of the form: a is v-ing. Thefocus is on defeasible progressives such as:(A) Anne was walking to the store when she was run over.In particular, the truth-conditions for such sentences and their logicalrelation to other sentences, such as ‘‘Anne walked to the store’’, arediscussed.2. Speaking of ActionsThe infinitive form of action verbs is the most basic means available inEnglish for speaking of actions. The verb phrase (to) walk to the store can besaid to designate an action-type (as opposed to an action token). Theinfinitive form is not normally manifested in actual utterances of English;rather, different aspects of the performance of actions are manifested: an