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5.2.5. Incompletive
At first, see the following example.

(18) I read the book last night.

In the above, "read" is uses as the past tense, it means finishing one book. the past tense means completive to treat the event as the past. when the progressive form is used, it is as follows.

(19) I was reading the book last night.

The act is paid attention to. Although it has the durative act, do you know it means completive?
Actually, it is not included in the above, because the speaker only pays attention to the act. The past tense means completive, but with the progressive form does not refer to it. That is, it includes the book is not finished as the meaning.


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As mentioned above, the progressive form has incompletive, we can understand the next examples easily.

(20)
a. The man drowned.
b. The bus stopped.

In the above, the two verbs are not the same as "read." These are also the action verbs but they themselves have completive. For example, drown means into dead, that is occurred only once. If the same person drown repeatedly, we have to rise again from the dead. And "stop" is the same, to stop again, we have to run again.

These verbs mean reaching fulfillment, even if the progressive form is used, the duration and the repeated act can not be expressed. The action verbs have that kind of the verb.

But we can use the progressive form with it. See the following examples.

(21)
a. The man was drowning.
b. The bus was stopping.

In the above, it is natural that the repeated acts are not expressed. Actually these mean the processes of the acts to fulfillment. For example in (21b), it means the bus slows down and in a few second we will see the bus stopped there.


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