Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

The English progressive 85
If we assume that the ‘attitude-focussed’ uses of the progressive go back to the
beon/wesan + Vende construction, this accords well with the fact that narrative
and stative progressives are so well represented in the Old English data, i.e., in the
period when the beon/wesan + Vende periphrasis was prevalent.
It may seem, then, that the English progressive has not undergone PROG
imperfective drift, at least not on the above definition of the phenomenon. However,
Bertinetto et al. present an alternative version of PROG imperfective drift as
well. Their secondary hypothesis is expressed in their discussion of the following
well-known sentence from Old English:
(18) Sume syndan creopende on eorða mid eallum lichoman, swa swa
some are creeping on the earth with all body such as
wurmas doð. Sume gað on twam fotum, sume on feower fotum, sume
worms do some walk on two feet some on four feet some
fleoð mid fyðerum.
fly with wings
“some creep on the earth with their whole body, just as worms do. Some walk
on two feet, some on four feet, some fly with wings”
(Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, I, 11.52–55)
This sentence is given a peculiar treatment by Bertinetto et al. The whole idea
that the English progressive was originally locative seems to rest on this very sentence
as it is the only example they give from Old English. Then later on – in a
footnote! – it is admitted that the relevant sentence is in fact a dubious example of
a locative construction and therefore throws doubt on the hypothesis in Fig. 1. The
relevant passage is given below:
Note, however, that the permanent stative (or individual-level) interpretation
of example (25b) [my example 18, KK] presupposes an equative, rather than
a locative meaning of the copula. Thus, there are grounds to believe that there
are in fact two possible sources for progressive periphrases, incorporating an existential-locative
meaning or an existential-equative meaning respectively, with
the latter converging with the former at some stage.
Another hypothesis that one could plausibly put forth is that stage (i) constitutes
an entirely independent evolutionary path. Accordingly, one could suppose
that the periphrases of stage (ii) exploited an already existing morphosyntactic
structure, which had become available for a different usage. However, this hypothesis
is weakened by the fact that the same development has made its appearance
in two fairly heterogeneous languages, Latin and Old English.
(Bertinetto et al. 2000: 553, note 16)
The last sentence of this paragraph is an odd statement given that the reason
why Bertinetto et al. offer an alternative hypothesis in the first place is precisely the
fact that their original hypothesis did not seem to be borne out by the English data.