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

Subjective progressives in 7th and 8th century English 1
understood to be an aspectual marker which views the situation expressed by the
predicate as having begun and not yet finished at topic time. 9 Progressive aspect
is understood as a specific subtype of this general imperfective category which
further qualifies the situation as being viewed dynamically, i.e., as in progress
(cf. Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca 994: 26f.). Another controversial aspect of this
topic which, as it is not the focus of the present paper, I will only briefly touch
upon in this context are the particular progressive + perfect effects (such as
absence of result, focus on concomitant effects, cf. König 995: 62f.). 20 These
meanings should be understood as being pragmatically rather than semantically
determined, that is, as being induceable from the combination of the meanings of
progressive and perfect where, however, the context only can offer clues about the
actuation of one of the possible meanings. For the present purpose, I have grouped
all of these pragmatic effects together. The important criterion for this chapter is
only whether the progressive carries its aspectual meaning (which it clearly does
when the product of the combination with the perfect are such effects as absence
of result, cf. König 995: 63) or whether its function is rather subjective, as it is in
the following example of an interpretative progressive in the perfect:
( ) the Insect stood upon the inwards bulbous Part, and beat upon the outward Coat,
as if it had been working it off as it went (archer\ 700–49.bre\ 724fair.s2 5 )
Quite similar to ( 0), this sentence in the past perfect progressive offers a more
speaker-based view of the event described neutrally in the preceding sentence, using
a comparison, while none of the typical effects of the combination of perfect
and progressive in aspectual use – such as focus on duration, focus on recency, concomitant
effects and absence of result – can be observed. In contrast, the following
example can be classified as an objective/aspectual use of a perfect progressive:
( 2) I was call’d out to see it [an odd apparition in the sky], by the Servants, who had
been looking at it about half a quarter of an Hour
(archer\ 700–49.bre\ 720perc.s2)
Here, we have the typical focus on duration, made explicit by the adverbial (about
half a quarter of an hour), and furthermore the situation described by the predicate
is either still in progress at topic time or only recently stopped.
1 . The term topic time goes back to Klein ( 994: 3) and refers to the time for which a claim is
made about the situation expressed by the predicate.
0. Understanding these meanings as pragmatically determined is preferred here, since
attempts to analyse the perfect progressive in a strict formal semantic framework do not seem to
be able to account for all characteristics of actual use (cf. Klein 994 and the criticism provided
by Lucko 994).