Progressive aspect is often conceptualized as the location of a participant in the situation in question. A first example of this appears in the introductory chapter. The English progressive of the structure be V-ing () goes back to an absentive construction which locates the referent of the subject first in the physical space, then, with advancing grammaticalization, in his situation, with the effect of defocusing the temporal boundaries of this situation.

The progressive construction in Mandarin follows a very similar grammaticalization path (Chang 2013). Contemporary Mandarin uses the grammatical verb zài ‘be [in a place]’ as the first component of a verb series whose second component codes the specific situation (Sun & Bisang 2020; ).

The verb zài is documented from the oldest texts. Its basic meaning is ‘live’, as in the first occurrence in . The second occurrence in the same passage already shows its locative function (example adapted from Sun & Bisang, punctuation added).

In Late Old Chinese, zài appears as the first component of a serial construction whose second component is the core verb. In the initial phase of this process, zài still needs its own local complement; deictic local adverbs like nàlǐ ‘there’ fulfill this function as a dummy (a).

In a second phase, the dummy is dispensed with, so the core verb follows zài directly and forms a construction with it (b). This reaches the final phase which is already illustrated by : zài is a progressive auxiliary. It is meanwhile so well entrenched in this function that it has started being reinforced by zhèng ‘just’ to form 正在 zhèngzài V ‘be just V-ing’.

Reference

Chang, Li-Hsiang 2013, ‘The grammaticization of the progressive marker zai in Mandarin Chinese’. Hwa Kang English Journal 19: 131-155. [download]