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summary
ʽInfinitive Sickness
On the nature and development of the Icelandic progressive construction vera að + inf.ʼ
Keywords: progressive aspect, Aktionsart, stative, habitual, implicature
This paper presents a semantic analysis of states and habitual constructions in the progres-
sive, a fairly recent development in Icelandic.
The progressive is an aspectual category where the focus is on a single, dynamic event
being in progress at a certain time — the reference time – and in Icelandic it is usually rep-
resented with the construction vera að + inf. ‘be to + inf’. It is generally considered to be a
sub-category of the imperfective aspect, just like the habitual aspect, and one of the
descriptions typically given for the progressive is that it cannot have a habitual reading.
Similarly, stative predicates are categorized as imperfective but non-progressive. In recent
years the use of the progressive with both stative predicates and habitual sentences has
been on the rise in Icelandic, much to the dismay of many who worry about the develop-
ment af the language. However, the use of states and habituals with the progressive seems
to yield a slightly different meaning from the one they have when they occur in the simple
past/present.
I argue that the subtle meaning difference between progressive and non-progressive
statives and habituals is in fact an implicature. Stative verbs are shifted to being events in
order to take on one or more of the prototypical eventive properties, and as events they
can occur in the progressive. In such cases they usually imply dynamicity, control and/or
„Nafnháttarsýki“ 67