Reacting to a small point in Johanna Rubba's posting:
It's true that "are going" and similar verb sequences are referred to
present progressive verbs in the English grammatical tradition, but
certainly that is not the only way to look at them.  A comparable sequence
in Spanish, "estamos yendo", is taken in the Spanish grammatical tradition
to be a sequence of a (non-auxiliary) verb, estamos ("[we] are"), and a
gerund, yendo ("going").  In Spanish, gerunds are defined as adverbial forms
of verbs (not noun-like), and this combination of verb and gerund is not
regarded as a special tense which ought to have a name like "present
progressive", even though its meaning and grammatical formation is very
close to English.  Sometimes it seems to me that the English tradition is so
ingrained that it is difficult to see the advantages of alternative
analyses, but in this case, once I get past that, I don't see that the
English tradition is really better than the Spanish one.


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