Analyzing progressives in Norwegian

Abstract

In this paper, the Norwegian progressive forms are examined by way of a corpus study, including both a monolingual corpus and a Norwegian–English parallel corpus. The corpora reveal patterns and properties of Norwegian progressives that are novel compared to those of a well-studied aspectual system like that in English. The study shows that the progressives should be grouped into two subgroups, according to their combinatorial and semantic properties. The array of properties that is brought out by the examination of the monolingual and parallel corpora is accounted for in a formal semantic frame, based on works by Dowty (1979) and Krifka (1992, 1998), and also drawing on insights from, among others, Rothstein (1999, 2004).