ABSTRACT
This chapter presents evidence which provides some support for the existence of a grammatical continuum, in contrast to a model which postulates only discrete boundaries between categories. It explores evidence for a different type of effect observed for ING. The chapter argues that the basic categories in English where may occur do not constitute a set of discrete elements, but are linearly related along a continuum. The concept of a grammatical continuum appears in earlier work on English syntax. John Ross argues for the existence of grammatical continua in English on the basis of a number of syntactic diagnoses applied to a range of sentence types. The continuum is relevant to the present discussion, because it will be shown that exhibits sensitivity to the nominal or verbal status of grammatical categories, and that it manifests itself along a continuum rather than between discretely demarcated categories.
