“N bɛ taalen”, “n taara” are both used to say something like ‘I am going/leaving’. Why is the past tense or verbs in which their action is supposedly completed used to marking progressiveness?
I was thinking that ‘ne taara’ is kind of like in english when we say ‘I am gone now…’ when your trying to express that you are leaving.
For “N bɛ taalen”, it seems as if since ‘bɛ’ marks incompletion and ‘taalen’ with ‘-len’ marking a result, the sentence and the use of incompletion following by a result makes it seem as if one is desiring to have the result of ‘taalen’, but has not been completed (‘bɛ’).
Please let me know what you think.
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I ni ce, Malik!
It sounds to me like you have your answer: it’s a little bit like the English usage of “I’m gone” when in fact you are stating ‘I am leaving now’.
Just like you have observed, where I learned the language, we would frequently say “N taara” (“I have left”) to this very effect of ‘I am about to go’.
As for N bɛ taalen, I don’t naturally use it myself, but it’s contextual meaning and grammatical parts are clear even if it’s a bit idiomatic in terms of literal meaning. I would more naturally have said something like this myself:
N taalen don
I + went + it.is‘I am gone’
But people are always innovating! 
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