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

Subjective progressives in 7th and 8th century English 4
since we also find type 2 progressives without modals, as in (2). The cooccurrence
of subjective progressive with modals should rather be viewed in the light of a
more general criterion, namely that subjective elements tend to cluster: speakers
who wish to express a certain attitude toward a proposition generally seem to do
so by using more than one linguistic marker. This is the criterion I applied in my
classification of this type of subjective progressive, so that my analysis is based
on evidence from the cotext, i.e., on the presence of other devices available for
expressing emotions in close vicinity to the progressive. 4 Apart from the use of
modals, which clearly also express speaker-attitude based meanings, such devices
include subjective markers such as interjections, lexical metaphorizations 5 and
connotation-loaded lexemes (cf. also Hübler 998: 3). 6
3.3 Type 3: Interpretative progressives
The interpretative function of the progressive has not been recognized until rather
recently, which has led to the assumption that the function as such is also of very
recent date. 7 In my data, interpretative progressives occur from the earliest subperiod
onwards, i.e., since the early seventeenth century, although they are not
nearly as common as in later centuries. The interpretative progressive is characterized
by the fact that “all the sentences consist of two parts, A and B[…]. The
A part expresses [or consists of] the observed behaviour, the B part sums up or
interprets this behaviour“ (Ljung 980: 70f.). One can notice that “it is the clause
with the simple form […] which gives the more fundamental description, i.e., the
14. In his analysis of this type of subjective progressive, Smitterberg (2005: 225f.) also checked
the near context of the progressive for expressions of emotion. However, he applied this criterion
only to the limited set of progressives which fulfilled three out of the four formal criteria – a
procedure which will clearly yield a more limited number of instances and, in my view, miss out
on a number of progressives best analysed as subjective.
1 . The importance of metaphorical uses of the lexical verb has also been noted in this context
by Fitzmaurice (2004a: 34).
1 . Hübler ( 998) provides a helpful list of linguistic devices available for the expression of
speaker-attitude, but he ends up going somewhat too far in his analysis of different grammatical
constructions which he claims to have subjective functions, giving excessive importance to
the subjective element in grammar, as e.g., in his claim that the subjective meaning is the core
function of the OE progressive.
1 . Buyssens ( 968: 36– 56) seems to be the first to have treated this function systematically.
His claim, though, that no scholar before him had noticed this function is not tenable, since
Charleston ( 955: 276) already recognized that a common use in PDE is that of “equating one
action in the unexpanded form with another in the expanded form, the expanded form being in
some way an interpretation of the action expressed in the unexpanded form”.