Re: Are "semi-creoles" widespread?

In article <fb6mn9$1eg6$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
naddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Christian Weisgerber) wrote:

Nathan Sanders <nsanders@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.

The way English grammar is traditionally taught is filled with errors,
such as lumping "very", "not", and "happily" all together as adverbs,
so it doesn't surprise me that the progressive isn't labeled an aspect
by English teachers.

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?

Of course, but seven million raw hits is a significant number ("Saddam
Hussein" only gets 4 million), more than sufficient to show that a
particular construction is probably alive and well.

Also, some of these hits are bound to refer to the
adjective "wanting".

True, but it's hard to filter them out with Google's search. However,
the adjectival use of "BE+wanting" is relatively rare; I counted
approximately 1 out of every 30 hits in "is wanting" to be adjectival.
It is even more rare for first- and second-person subjects; I couldn't
find any adjectival uses in the first couple hundred hits for "I am
wanting" and "you are wanting". I wouldn't be surprised if the
proportion of adjectival "wanting" in the seven million hits is within
the expected noise level of Google search results.

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?

It's perfectly fine English. I'm not really sure I can adequately
explain the difference between "I am wanting" and "I want". Using the
progressive seems to add some immediacy or importance to the act of
wanting, but I'm not sure this holds in every case.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

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