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

Subjective progressives in 7th and 8th century English 3
. The relation between subjectification/objectification
and grammaticalization
The reason why we find that objectification rather than subjectification accompanies
the grammaticalization of the progressive in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury
English can be found in the fact that the progressive is undergoing a
secondary grammaticalization process – a process through which a construction
becomes more clearly grammatical, e.g., as its functions become a more fixed part
of grammar. If we look at the preceding development of the form, we find that most
scholars agree that the progressive had a peripheral status in grammar from OE
up to EModE – it could be used for the expression of aspectual meaning, but was not
obligatory in any context, and the choice was rather determined by idiosyncratic
taste and questions of style. Now, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it
gradually becomes a part of the English tense-aspect system. In the nineteenth
century this development will proceed further, as visible in a further considerable
rise in frequency (cf. Arnaud 983, 998) and in such new developments as
a formally marked passive (cf. Pratt & Denison 2000; Hundt 2004). But already in
the eighteenth century the trend is very clear: in Table , we can see a steady rise
in frequency and a clear change in the distributions of the objective and subjective
functions. Over ninety percent of progressives in the second half of the eighteenth
century are used to express aspectual meaning: in other words, the aspectual function
clearly becomes the main one.
The increase in the use of the form for aspectual functions, associated with
the greater fixation of the grammatical meaning, necessarily lead to a decrease in
the subjective functions of the construction, because, as the aspectual meaning
becomes more fixed, the construction ceases to be available for the expression of
speaker attitude in certain contexts. 22 This is obvious in PDE: if I must say I am
working right now, because *I work right now would be ungrammatical, then I can
obviously no longer invest the progressive in such contexts with any subjective
shades of meaning. For an element to be available for the expression of speaker
attitude, the speaker has to be free to choose whether or not to use it (cf. Hübler
998: 5), so as soon as an element or construction has become an obligatory element
of grammar, its meaning cannot become enriched any more by inferences
that can produce subjective meaning. The present study of one particular secondary
grammaticalization process may look like a slender empirical basis to support
the general claim that secondary grammaticalization typically is accompanied by
. The decline is both relative (from 29% to 5% of all progressives) and absolute (from
instances per 00,000 words to 5).