A Locative Approach to the Existentiality of the English Progressives

Abstract

The English progressive construction has been so far paid little attention other than its aspectual interpretation and analyzed as such in the syntax. This paper explores a locative approach to the existentiality of the English progressives by adopting that location is a relevant concept to the existential interpretation of bare plurals. Extending the concept of localizability to an analysis of the English progressives, I propose that the existentiality of the English progressives is naturally derivable through the course of anchoring the event to the implicit aspectual locative head Loc (AT) in the syntax. I will also demonstrate how nicely the aspectual locative analysis proposed in this study fits into the existential there construction.