This paper offers a new unified theory about the meaning of the imperfective and progressive aspects that builds on earlier of analyses in the literature that treat the imperfective as denoting a universal quantifier (e.g. Bonomi, Linguist Philos, 20(5):469–514, 1997; Cipria and Roberts, Nat Lang Semant 8(4):297–347, 2000). It is shown that the problems associated with such an analysis can be overcome if the domain of the universal quantifier is taken to be a partition of a future extending interval into equimeasured cells. Treating the partition-measure (the length of each partition-cell) as a contextually dependent variable allows for a unified treatment of the habitual and event-in-progress readings of the imperfective.

The goal of this paper is twofold: (1) to present a writing-support tool which uses both text corpora approach for linguistic analysis and text reuse to assist non-native English writers, and (2) to describe an enhancement to the tool’s self-review process that uses a Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) model of language. SFL provides a framework for categorizing the major text adaptations available to the writer during the self-review process. Making explicit the SFL-based textual reformulation of published English-language papers can provide a way to develop students’ academic drafting and revising skills in a foreign language. This approach presents both the reasons for, and the effects of, specific changes made during the self-review process. Explaining the genre writing skills performed by native expert authors in a linguistically-motivated way is a first step in building an effective learning environment for scientific writing.