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I'm leaving next week.

As shown here, the present progressive can represent an event that will happen in the future. I'm wondering what's the reasoning behind this feature.

The one I can think of is that in English the act of "leaving" can start when you've decided in your mind that you will leave or when you've arranged for your leaving, either of which can be some time (e.g., a week) before your actual leaving.

I'd like to know if native speakers agree with this reasoning. If not, please articulate what you think is the reasoning.

EDIT

Both the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) by Pullum and Oxford Modern English Grammar (OMEG) by Aarts clearly say that the progressive futurate (i.e., the present progressive indicating a future event as in I'm leaving next week) does not have a progressive meaning to it.

OMEG on page 270 says:

It is important to be aware of the fact that [the progressive futurate] is not aspectual, that is, the situation is not regarded as unfolding over time.

I'd like the answers to be in accordance with this analysis that the progressive futurate is not aspectual.

JK2
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  • @Clare Of course, you can. But I think you shouldn't simply ignore what these grammars suggest but should be able to distinguish your own view from those of these grammars. – JK2 May 19 '17 at 02:23
  • @Clare I'm not sure I agree with you that "Tomorrow I'm going to work" differs from "Tomorrow I will go to work" in this way; but I also doubt that the point is perfectly responsive. The question was (wasn't it?) why we use the progressive as a future tense when we do not mean to suggest progressive activity. Are you disagreeing that we can do that? – Chaim May 19 '17 at 14:39
  • What is your actual question? Don't CGEL and OMEG explain the "reasoning" (meaning/subtle meaning) of using the present progressive to refer to the future, as compared with the many other ways that speakers refer to the future? There is no actual reasoning going on in a native speaker's mind, he just codifies his meaning in one of the many ways to refer to the future, based on how he learned these verbal codes and their meanings from childhood... – Arm the good guys in America May 19 '17 at 15:21
  • @Clare All CGEL and OMEG explain regarding the "progressive futurate" is to say that it is not aspectual, i.e., it does not denote a progressive meaning, which explanation is actually contrary to your and sumelic's instinct about it. – JK2 May 19 '17 at 19:27
  • First, let me change course agree that the progressive futurate does refer to an ongoing process. The way researchers have handled this is to say that there are two progressive morphemes in English, one that indicates an event in progress and one that doesn't. However, what is meant by "in progress" has been the subject of much research and scholarly debate For instance: He was crossing the street when he got hit by a truck (and thus did not actually cross the street) does not refer to the ongoing process of crossing the street, since he never crossed the street. Also... – Arm the good guys in America May 21 '17 at 19:58
  • Joe was making a pumpkin pie but someone had used the last can of pumpkin does describe the ongoing process of making a pumpkin pie, since it's not true that Joe was actually in the process of making a pumpkin pie. The same is true for You're making pumpkin pie! uttered by an observer, who sees Joe turn the oven on and take out spices from the cupboard that he only uses to make pumpkin pie, who also is unaware that there is no pumpkin at hand. The sentence is valid but it does not describe an ongoing process. You can't say that jumping in the car and going to the grocery store to buy... – Arm the good guys in America May 21 '17 at 20:03
  • more pumpkin makes the sentence valid because that action is not the prototypical way of making pumpkin pie. There are many other issues with defining actually what the progressive morpheme means. These get complicated very fast and involve 'other worlds' and modal reasoning/logic. At the same time, at least two studies assert that there actually is only one progressive morpheme in English and that the significance of the concurrent progressive and the futurate progressive are the same. One way to do this is to show that the concurrent progressive does not refer to ongoing activities. – Arm the good guys in America May 21 '17 at 20:08
  • In my comment here, I meant to write "does not describe the ongoing process of making a pumpkin pie" in my first sentence. These example sentences are taken from "Unifying Concurrent and Futurate Progressives" (Brandon Robert Beamer, May 2015, draft) – Arm the good guys in America May 21 '17 at 20:30
  • See also "The Plan's the Thing: Deconstructing Futurate Meanings" (Bridget Copley, article in Linguistic Inquiry · April 2008) – Arm the good guys in America May 21 '17 at 20:57
  • urg, the opening line of my comment here should say that "...the progressive futurate does refer to an ongoing process." – Arm the good guys in America May 21 '17 at 21:07
  • @Clare Thanks for the references. You seem to be quite versed in this "progressive" field. Having read all those recent linguistic developments, why don't you write me a comprehensive answer? – JK2 May 22 '17 at 02:10
  • @Clare In "The Plan's the Thing", Copley says: "It has been proposed that imperfective semantics are responsible for futurate meaning (e.g., Dowty (1979); Cipria and Roberts (2000)). What these proposals have in common is the idea that a plan for an event can constitute an early stage of the event, and thus that imperfective sentence about the event can be true before the event has begun, while the event is only a gleam in someone's eye. This idea is likely to be correct. But it raises the question of why exactly a plan can count as an early stage for an event." – JK2 May 22 '17 at 05:10
  • @Clare Doesn't the quote of Copley essentially convey the same thing as what I have said in my question? (In English the act of "leaving" can start when you've decided in your mind that you will leave or when you've arranged for your leaving, either of which can be some time (e.g., a week) before your actual leaving.) – JK2 May 22 '17 at 05:15
  • Yeah, Copley says that. Which surprises me. As a native speaker I can't buy that idea. You should read what Beamer says about that. He goes through Copley's analysis step-by-step at one point. And by the way, I'm not that well versed on the topic; your question made me curious and so I started researching. – Arm the good guys in America May 22 '17 at 10:38
  • @Clare I've read Beamer. He doesn't necessarily rebut the proposition itself Copley was quoted as saying in my earlier comment. In fact, I think Beamer fine-tunes the proposition. – JK2 May 22 '17 at 12:20
  • Beamer is explicit: "the semantics of the current proposal has nothing to do with whether an event is in progress." Therefore he would reject any interpretation of the progressive that means that somehow an action is continuous or in progress from the moment of the current plan to its execution, if indeed it's executed. – Arm the good guys in America May 24 '17 at 15:27
  • Beamer (bottom page 1): "...(Dowty, 1977), which proposes that we might simultaneously account for the semantics of concurrent and futurate progressives if we extend our notion of events to include their planning stages as well. Unifying progressives in this way would require a radical departure from standard and very strong intuitions about what events are and what it means for them to begin, end, and be in progress." In other words, he can't buy this explanation, whether expressed by Dowty, Copley, or you. :) – Arm the good guys in America May 24 '17 at 15:36
  • @Clare Your quote of Beamer is subsequently followed by his following remark: "This paper investigates the possibility that these intuitions are mistaken. In this paper I aim to show that the concurrent progressive and the futurate progressive have the same truth-conditional semantics." Which and the following pages show that Beamer thinks the "intuitions are mistaken." – JK2 May 24 '17 at 16:31
  • Exactly, and for him Neither the concurrent progressive nor the futurate progressive has a truth-conditional semantic of an action in progress. The whole import, the whole force, the entire argument of Beamer is that (even) concurrent progressives do not have the quality of an act in progress. Thus neither does the futurate progressive. I'm afraid if we can't agree on what the author is saying, there's no use swapping remarks. – Arm the good guys in America May 24 '17 at 16:48
  • @Clare You're right about Beamer saying that the concurrent progressive do not describe an act in progress any more than the futurate progressive does. But Beamer doesn't reject the Copley's idea (i.e., "The Plan's the Thing" in the futurate progressive). – JK2 May 26 '17 at 05:14
  • @Clare In fact, Beamer clearly shows that he inherits Copley's idea about "the plan" in his conclusion: "Plans and foreknowledge are so heavily linked to futurate progressives because without such properties of the current situation, there would be no sustaining conditions to link the future event to the present. Plans, schedules, and similar kinds of foreknowledge are precisely the kinds of sustaining conditions which are needed in order to make progressives work when the event is not in progress." – JK2 May 26 '17 at 05:15

3 Answers3

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I disagree. I see it as the same of the use of the simple present for the future ("I leave next week" is also valid). "I'm leaving next week" in no way implies that "I'm leaving today" in some sense; in fact, it has the opposite implication.

To me, what it seems is that the use of phrase specifying the time, such as "next week," establishes the reference frame of the sentence, and the present interpretation takes place relative to that reference frame. It's like "Imagine that it is next week. At that time, the following statement will be true: "I'm leaving.'" Kind of like the use of the "narrative present" with a time label attached, like in a script or something

Next week: I'm leaving.

This explanation also has its problems. We don't usually say things "I'm leaving last week", even though it's possible to imagine narrating an event in the past. I think this may be because narrative past exists and is naturally used often with past-tense markers.

I did find an example of present + "last week", though, which is maybe similar:

Funny how I say I'm leaving last week to come back and find this place gone to hell and not just my name being used but your and Gregg making endless false accusations that I'm guilty for it all.

ulTRAX reply to Modavations • 5 years ago - comment on "Small Biz Owners On Job Creation", http://onpoint.legacy.wbur.org/2011/12/07/small-biz-owners

How I would explain this is, narrative present can be used to describe past events as well, but it requires more context (a longer passage of narration) since by default people assume narrative in the present tense is non-past, since it could be but isn't marked for past tense.

Probably, there are a number of people who would find problems with my explanation, and there might be evidence against it that I don't know of. The fact is, native speakers don't really know this kind of thing automatically. People just use the present tense in these contexts because it sounds natural.

Community
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herisson
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    The simplest explanation is that English has a two-tense system, past and non-past (do, did); all other "tenses" are periphrastic (will do, be doing, have done) and are often forgone for their simpler alternatives. – Anonym May 17 '17 at 03:58
  • I understand that you think that the present tense am in I'm leaving next week isn't quite restricted to the present time but actually is timeless as in leave in I leave next week, right?

    If so, why do you think native speakers bother ever using the more complex am leaving instead of the simpler leave to denote the same timeless meaning?

     – JK2 May 17 '17 at 04:06
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    Native speakers also say "I will be leaving (e.g.,) in August", especially when leaving from a place where they have not yet gone. Or perhaps just a more distant future. – Xanne May 17 '17 at 06:41
  • I've added EDIT. Please let me know how your answer is compatible with the progressive futurate not being aspectual. If your answer is not compatable with that, please either edit your answer to make it compatible or show that CGEL and OMEG are mistaken about their analysis. – JK2 May 18 '17 at 07:40
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    Much of Funny how I say I'm leaving last week… appears not to have been penned by a literate native, making the rest at best dubious.

    Is it not true that the meaning is Funny how last week I say I'm leaving… and aren't they as different as chalk and cheese?

     – Robbie Goodwin May 21 '17 at 20:59
  • The blog comment "Funny how I say I'm leaving last week" means, in full context, "Last week I say I'm leaving and I come back and find the place has gone to hell . . ." – Xanne May 25 '17 at 09:27
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    "Hooray! I'm going to Harvard!" <--- There's no indexing temporal adjunct there. We don't necessarily use one at all - so it's pretty hard to imagine that we're using the progressive because of some kind of simultaneity. – Araucaria - Him May 25 '17 at 11:15
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When we use the present continuous to talk about a plan in the future, it is called a Future Arrangement Present Continuous in English grammar. It is used to emphasis that you are certain that something will happen, to the point that you can talk about it as if it's already happening in front of your eyes.

BBC Learning English explanation

Both "will be leaving" and "is leaving" are correct, but the latter implies more certainty, and is less formal. The Present Continuous for Future Arrangements is usually used in spoken English.

Adam
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CGEL and OMEG argue, as I understand it, that the, uh, “progressive futurate” is not aspectual, by which is meant this verbal expression is not referring to an ongoing action. I agree with this.

There are many ways in which I can express the idea that next Friday I will be going to Europe, including "I am leaving for Europe on Friday."

If a friend wants to call me on the phone on Friday, I say I can't do that because I'm leaving for Europe on Friday.

I can't go to the ball game on Thursday because I'm baking a pie for the bake sale and I'm going to the doctor on Thursday. To say "I will bake a pie on Thursday" doesn't convey the same meaning at all.

A friend wants to get some of those nice textiles from Italy, and I say I'm going to Italy in August.

What all of these examples have in common is that at the time when I am being requested to do something else, I will be in a state or condition of leaving for Europe, baking a pie, going to the doctor, which at that time will be an ongoing (progressive) action, or, more simply an action underway.

There's a subtle difference beween saying: I leave for Europe Friday, I will leave for Europe Friday, I am leaving for Europe Friday.

It seems to me there's a desperate effort to make things fit into prior patterns with all this stuff about people not really being in the process of crossing a street or baking a pumpkin pie, which in fact they are. But "I am going to Europe on Friday" expresses something that will happen in the future that will be at that time on ongoing activity. I agree that the activity has not yet begun--it's not the "plan" that's important, it's what the verb says about what I will be doing in the future.

tchrist
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Xanne
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