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

Subjective progressives in 7th and 8th century English 43
objective (i.e., aspectual) uses of the progressive. The evidence from the relevant
section of ARCHER-2 (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers 2)
will then be analysed. For the present purpose, I have analysed the seventeenth
and eighteenth century data of the corpus, i.e., a subsection of 57 ,887 words. 3
The evidence from this corpus study will provide a clear picture of the general
development of subjectification and/or objectification of the progressive in its
development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
. Subjective and objective meanings of the progressive
from Old English to Modern English
Progressives generally seem to be used for two reasons in OE: they either highlight
the imperfective character of a situation or “function [...] as an index of the speaker’s
emotional attitude toward the propositional content expressed” (Hübler 998: 63).
Hübler offers a number of examples of OE progressives where the progressive may
be understood to underline the ‘remarkableness’ of an event (Hübler 998: 70),
such as in Wæs he Mellitus mid lichoman untrymnesse mid fotadle swiðe gehefigad
... he glaedlice all eorðlic þing wæs oferhleapende ... “Mellitus suffered severely
from bodily infirmity ... , but still, ..., he surmounted with alacrity all earthly
obstacles ...” (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, 6, 30: example and translation from
Hübler 998: 69). Although there can be little doubt that the progressive had subjective
meanings in OE, it is problematic to consider the subjective function as its
core function. Hübler’s ( 998: 86–89) argumentation in favour of this view is not
convincing. He recognizes the fact that OE progressives were also used to express
time-frame but claims that these uses are distributionally different from the progressives
expressing speaker attachment, which he understands as the main function
of the progressive in OE. But a brief look at OE instances, e.g., those adduced
in Nickel ( 966), shows that aspectual and attitudinal meanings actually coincide
in a number of examples. Nickel expresses the contrary position to Hübler: he
believes that a subjective element may be observed in individual examples, but
that this is by no means a systematic function (Nickel 966: 237). According to
him, there is rather a strong indication that imperfectivity was the distinguishing
3. ARCHER-2 altogether includes nearly 2.5 million words of British and American English,
covering different text types from the timespan 600– 999. The corpus was accessed in June
2005 at the University of Heidelberg. At the time, the American English part of the corpus
only covered later periods, so that the data used for the present study only consists of British
English.