What is it about?

The present paper aims to contribute to our understanding of how the active posture participle “yālis” (sitting) plus imperfective verb have come to express the progressive aspect in Emirati Arabic. The proposed answer to this puzzling question involves the claim that, crosslinguistically, progressive constructions are known to originate from locative constructions in which the agent is described as in the midst of an activity.

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Why is it important?

One of the vital insights of grammaticalization theory is that grammaticalization does not affect words in isolation but words in specific syntactic constructions. That is, the development in which verb + complement develops into constructions of the type progressive marker + main verb. This insight is borne out by the evidence provided in this paper.

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This page is a summary of: From bodily posture to progressive aspect marker, Lingua Posnaniensis, June 2015, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan,
DOI: 10.1515/linpo-2015-0005.
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