The study looks at the shared distribution of more than 90 progressives in two parallel corpora and discusses the characteristics of these contexts. It is shown that while progressives are used for dramatic and topical events in the present, they are typically used as backgrounding, supportive material in the past. It is shown that progressives generally have more occurrences in contexts with present time reference than past, this is especially true for progressives with many uses, i.e. more grammaticalized progressives. A number of progressives temporally restricted are also presented. Two historical explanations for these restrictions are provided, both of which result from the higher frequency of present uses over past.

Part of table from the article by Ghazaleh Vafaeian

The article is published in Studies in Language and is available online:

Progressives in present and past (www.jbe-platform.com)