Can this answer be improved?

Question

Is it just me or is this answer's wording kind of ambiguous and confusing? Despite the 9 votes it's amassed so far, I am having a hard time understanding its content accurately. I was trying to go through the post and fix grammar issues and improve readability and clarity, but I was not sure I understood the author's intent. I'd post a comment requesting further clarification from the answerer, but since this is an old answer, and seeing how the answerer may not be active any more and the follow-up comment from the OP hasn't been responded to, I figured it might be better to write a meta post. By posting this, I intend to pose this question: Is it possible to solicit community effort on older posts?

The answerer claims:

It's basically the moment when someone did a verb (past tense), receive a change in state, and the result can be seen clearly as a consequence of the verb.

食べている I am eating

notice that here the action 'eat' has been done. The speaker is in the state of eating as a consequence of doing the verb eat and start on the moment after the speaker bite, chew, and swallow. We regard this as progressive verb because as you did the verb, it is continuous.

But if they meant to say ている expresses "a consequence of the verb", shouldn't it be "I have eaten" instead of "I am eating"? I am not sure what "in the state of eating as a consequence of doing the verb eat" is intended to mean. I can't wrap my head around "as you did the verb, it is continuous" either. Is the answerer talking about "eat" as happening in an instant or as a continuous action?

落ちている It's on the ground

Here, you don't say that this means it is falling. Now imagine a coin is falling in the air from a table in midair. This coin hasn't done the verb 'fall', after all if this coin has done it, then we'd say the past tense (fell) while it is in the midair (which is weird).

I think I roughly understand what the answerer is trying to say in this paragraph above, but I think it needs some work.

verb + ing doesn't always mean progressive verb because some are instantaneous and doesn't possess the continuous manner (like the verb 'fall'). This type of verbs then, when changed into + ing, will mean that it is on the progress that the verb is going to be done (but not yet done... it's like on it's way to do the verb). (not the progress after the verb had begun).

It is unclear what the answerer is arguing here. Are they using English verbs as a way to categorize Japanese verbs? But I think it's fair to say English and Japanese have different ways of differentiating between action verbs and stative verbs. Some verbs considered action verbs in English may fall squarely under stative verbs in Japanese, and vice versa. The answerer didn't make it clear what they are talking about here. Nor is it clear whether they are setting apart from the the two verbs already discussed a new category of verbs with this passage.

Answer 1

I agree, I find it difficult to understand. To me it seems that he is implying that verbs in Japanese are instantaneous and only refer to the start or end point. That is, that verbs in Japanese only indicate the quasi-instantaneous moment in time when something changes its state from A to B. With his example of 食べている, it would then mean that 食べる　= "go from a state of not eating to a state of eating" (~start eating), and ている means that this "state of eating" is still active.

It is the same with his example of fall, but there he is arguing that the instantaneous action is committed when the object hits the ground, contrary to "eat" where he claims that the instantenous action designates the start point.

Then he seems to contradict himself where he says that "when changed into + ing, will mean that it is on the progress that the verb is going to be done". With this logic, 落ちている could refer to both situations where the object is already on the ground, and to situations where the object started moving towards the ground but did not yet hit it.

.... I'm glad I learned Japanese on Kyushu, where we use よる / とる to differentiate.

My impression of this answer is that the person has not learned how to properly distinguish between actions that are currently being done (進行相), and those that are finished but whose result still remain (結果相), and that he has a (from a European perspective) very unique way of understanding verbs in order to explain it...