A Comparison of Progressive forms in English and Albanian

Abstract

The paper examines Albanian progressive forms and their distribution in comparison with the English progressive in order to find out the similarities and differences between the Albanian progressive and the progressive in English. The theoretical part presents a survey and a description of the forms of the progressive in each language. The research part first offers an analysis of progressive forms in an Albanian-English translation and then examines the progressive forms occurring in a text translated from English into Albanian. The results of the study qualify the observation made in the literature on the Albanian progressive in one important respect, viz. that of the two available structures the po-construction (in spite of its restriction to the present and the imperfect) rather than jam+duke forms is by far the more common as a means of expressing progressiveness in Albanian. It is thus the po particle construction that appears to be the prevailing Albanian progressive form whereas the role of the jam+duke construction is negligible. However, there is an asymmetry between the po-construction and the English progressive in the examined texts. While the English progressive translates 2/3 (and possibly more) of the Albanian po-constructions, only 1/3 of the English progressive forms are translated into Albanian by po-constructions. This, and the surprisingly low incidence of progressive constructions in the Albanian text, shows that the status of the Albanian progressive construction is indeed different from that of the English progressive.