What is it about?
Sentences like "Sue is being Mary today" (where Mary is a department manager in a large organization and Sue is her backup), "Nixon was just being Nixon", and "John is being a genius" appear to involve the progressive construction of sentences like "John is running". We argue that these sentences, rather, have an interpretation that involves a narrowing down of the properties of the subject of the sentence compared to its usual interpretation.
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Why is it important?
This article is the first to study the meaning of the class of sentences it treats. In so doing it increases our understanding of the so-called progressive aspect, by demonstrating a limitation on the scope of the progressive.
Perspectives
Writing this article gave the authors a chance to study and come to an understanding of sentences we had been curious about. It was fascinating to work on, because it forced us to rethink assumptions that we had taken for granted.
Susan Schmerling
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: On non-progressive being, The Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La revue canadienne de linguistique, July 2017, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/cnj.2017.38.
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