Re: Are "semi-creoles" widespread?

On Aug 30, 6:11 pm, na...@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Christian Weisgerber) wrote:
Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Perhaps once you consult such a grammar textbook (not that anyone
expects you to actually do so), you'll discover that progressive and
continuous are aspects, not tenses.

It used to be called "continuous form <of such and such tense>"
when I learned English in school. I don't think I ever heard
"aspect" as a grammatical term before encountering Russian.

That's why I initially used the term "Tense". I couldn't remember the
correct name for it, but "Aspect" would prbbly be correct. Or just
Progressive.
Constructions like "keep doing smt" are normally called an ing-form
with no special name, ASFAIK.

Here's your progressive/continuous "want", in perfectly normal English:

We've all been wanting you to do actual research in
linguistics, but you continue to disappoint us.

Thanks. "They'll be wanting..." also comes to mind, now that I
think about it.

"am wanting" gets over half a million Google hits
"is wanting" gets almost a million
"are wanting" gets more than a million and a half
"was/were wanting" together are just over a million
"been wanting" is at two million
"be wanting" is almost at a million

So we have a grand total of around *seven million* hits for the
progressive of "wanting",

Er, we all understand that the numbers Google shows are "estimates"
and are frequently overestimated by an order of magnitude or
two--right? Also, some of these hits are bound to refer to the
adjective "wanting".

They're only good as a ratio, when comparing A to B. Relative, not
absolute values!

But, yes, I'm stunned at what "I am wanting" turns up. I would
have considered usages such as "I am wanting to register a domain
name" to be ungrammatical. Normally my intuitions about English
grammar aren't that far off. What's going on here?

Are you a native speaker of German?

.

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