THE MEANING OF THE PROGRESSIVE IN SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE

At various times in the history of linguistics the progressive has been categorized as "tense," "aspect," or "form."1 Such confusion with regard to the description of such a common and productive construction derives principally from the apparent need to account for the pro gressive both syntactically and semantically, the seemingly wide range of usage and "meaning" that it encompasses in at least one language (English), and the misconception that the pro gressive cannot be accounted for as a unified construction within the scope and limits of the general verbal system of a given language. In this paper we investigate the temporal and aspectual focus of the action or state entailed by the use of the progressive in Spanish and Portuguese. We conclude by comparing the usage of the progressive in these two Romance languages with current usage in English in order to consider the pedagogical implications of this contrastive study for the teaching of Spanish and Portuguese within the context of bi lingualism and second-language acquisition.