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. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/