Revisiting the Semantics of Progressive

The progressive has gained much attention over the past few decades.Researchers focus on two aspects: the morphological variations across languages and the universal semantics.This survey concentrates on the works in a formal semantics framework, evaluating the literature from temporallybased approach to the eventbased approach to mereologicallybased approach.We further argue that the analysis of the Chinese progressive needs more refinements to some extent, and a unified explanation drawn from the facts of English only cannot be applied to Chinese.Chinese has two distinctive progressive markers (Zai and Zhe) and the traditionally held dynamicity/stativity distinction between Zai and Zhe needs to be reexamined.