A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

§7 Progressive aspect 51

is a conditional construction with the preterite expressing modal remoteness: this
means that the preterite can't also serve to locate the situation in past time, so this
has to be done by the perfect.

6.4 The continuative perfect

One difference between the perfect and the preterite is that we can use
the perfect to indicate that the situation lasted over a period starting before a certain
time and continuing up to that time. We call this the continuative use of the perfect,
as opposed to the non-continuative use:

[46] NON-CONTINUATIVE PERFECT

a. She has already gone to bed.

CONTINUATIVE PERFECT

b. She has been in bed fo r two hours.

11 a. She had already gone to bed when

we arrived.

b. She had been in bed fo r two hours

when we arrived.

In the [a] examples the perfect simply locates her going to bed in the past - rela­
tive to the time of speaking in the present perfect [ia] and to the time of our
arrival in the preterite perfect [iia].
In the [b] examples, however, her being in bed continued over a period of time:
in rib] it began two hours before the time of speaking, lasting until now, while in
[iib] this period began two hours before we arrived, lasting until then. The con­
tinuative interpretation is imperfective, so there is no implication in [ib/iib] that
the situation of her being in bed ended at the time of utterance or when we
arrived. (Similarly for [43ia], which is also continuative.)
The continuative use of the perfect is much less common than the non-continua­
tive one, and is usually marked explicitly by a duration expression giving the length
of the period in question, such as fo r two hours in [46].

7 Progressive aspect

The progressive is formed by means of auxiliary be followed by a
gerund-participle. Compare:

[47] PROGRESSIVE NON-PROGRESSIVE
a. She was writing a novel. b. She wrote a novel.

The concept of aspect

A grammatical form or construction qualifies as an aspect if its main use is to indi­
cate how the speaker views the situation described in the clause with respect not to
its location in time but to its temporal structure or properties.
Thus in [47] the time referred to is past in both [a] and [b], but the situation is
viewed in different ways. In [b] it is considered in its totality, as a complete event,