OK, that makes sense now. However, I'd be very grateful if you could clarify the following so that I'm sure I fully understand it. Namely, I don't think I understand what you meant by "even though the present".
I meant that it might continue
now and into the future.
I was referring to variation in how the progressive might occur: for example, the sentence:
We were eating all day yesterday.could mean two different things (or a mix):
1. We ate continuously, without stopping at all.
2. We ate repeatedly, so that in general yesterday we spent the day eating, but with some breaks, maybe moving from one restaurant to another, and while waiting to be served food, etc.
The "ongoing" nature of the progressive allows that ambiguity, and I was suggesting maybe the mix of progressive and perfective was meant to highlight that the "continuous" sense of ongoing was not right at the moment, but that the activity would again resume in the "repetitive" sense. But again, there isn't necessarily any strict logic going on here.
And If you don't mind. I’d like to ask you one more question about the PPC tense. If I said sth like that: I’ve been studying a lot recently, it would mean that I started studying in the past and I’m still studying at the moment of speaking, or I finished studying in the recent past. Is that right? That's what I can conclude from the definition.
That sentence is perfective, therefore only making direct statements about what has occurred up to now. Compare a simple past sentence:
I studied yesterday.It simply does not specify whether I also study today, or whether I will tomorrow. Context could clarify.
So for "I’ve been studying a lot recently" the default assumption would probably be that the action continues to go on into the present and future, unless there is some indication of change of behavior. But that same form would also be used in a context like "I've been eating a lot of unhealthy food lately, but I'm now on a diet to eat more healthy food". So, it can go either way. It doesn't explicitly say anything about anything other than past activity, and context determines the rest. Because it's an ongoing pattern, it probably continues unless otherwise specified.
There should be an implicature here that because you're choosing to refer to it in the perfective maybe it has stopped now (due to the principle of conversational relevance and probably the maxim of quantity), but as I mentioned above, that expectation doesn't seem to work out, because this usage has become conventionalized, probably because we often use narration to tell about what we've been doing recently in small talk and similar situations. It's a little awkward to try to rephrase as "I'm studying a lot these days" (although sometimes you'll hear something like that). There is probably also a conflict with the progressive as the default in English for true in-the-moment present tense ("I'm studying"), as opposed to the simple present which is really habitual ("I study"). Using the form "I've been studying" clarifies that I'm not asserting that I am currently studying-- of course not, because instead I'm having a conversation with you.
