My reply to Justine:You quoted me as saying in my book
English Plain and Simple that the present progressive tense is “for actions that will occur in the near future.” I’m afraid that that quote captures just part of how I defined the present progressive tense in the book. This is precisely what I wrote in Chapter 45 of Part II, Section 10: “
Present Progressive. This tense is used to describe two types of present continuing scenarios: (1) ongoing actions happening right now, and (2) actions that will occur in the very near future. Examples: ‘The moon
is shining.’ ‘I
am walking barefoot.’ ‘The girls
are singing in the rain.’ ‘I
am taking Marie to dinner tomorrow.’”
ILLUSTRATION FROM AMERICANENGLISH.STATE.GOV
The key idea in the present progressive tense is that it is about a continuing scenario at the present time, one that’s expected to go on in the very near future. When we say that “The moon is shining,” for instance, we are telling the listener that it’s shining right now and, from experience, will continue to do so unless a sudden cloud formation hides it from view. This is the sense of “in the very near future” in the definition of the present progressive tense, and this is what distinguishes it from the sense of a simple future tense sentence like, say, “The moon
will shine for another hour before the lunar eclipse at 11:00 P.M. tomorrow.” (We don’t say “The moon
will be shining for another hour before the lunar eclipse at 11:00 P.M. tomorrow,” nor do we say “The moon
shines for another hour before the lunar eclipse at 11:00 P.M. tomorrow.”)
Typically, the present progressive tense is formed with the present tense of the helping verb “be” plus the present participle of the operative verb (one ending in “-ing”), as in “We
are selling all of our family assets before moving to New Zealand next month.” As it is inherent in complex present progressive sentence constructions to have either present or future elements, the operative verb is sometimes modified by adverbs of time like “tomorrow,” “next week,” and the like.
In this context, this subordinate clause of this statement of Davao Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte and Atty. Manases Carpio that you quoted is in the present progressive tense: “We wish to inform the public that
we are attending the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee hearing.” Its simple future tense equivalent is, of course, “We wish to inform the public that
we will attend the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee hearing on Thursday, September 7, as scheduled.” As we can see, the use of the adverbs of time can make the difference between the simple future tense and the present progressive tense.
There’s one more thing that we need to know about the progressive tense forms: as rule, they occur only with
dynamic verbs, or verbs used primarily to indicate an action, process, or sensation; and not with
stative verbs, or verbs verb used primarily to describe a state or situation as opposed to an action or process. You can find a comprehensive discussion of this aspect of the progressive tenses in the
grammar.ccc.commnet.edu website.
