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

70 Kristin Killie
Opinions concerning the meaning or function of the progressive are also
divided. Terms used to characterize the Old English progressive include the following:
durative, frame time/simultaneity, terminate, bounded, intensive, emphatic,
futurity, repetition, characterizing, qualifying, descriptive, expression of
emotions, etc. (see Denison 1993 & Núñez-Pertejo 2004 for accounts). 2 A surprisingly
similar set of terms has been used to describe the English progressive
in more recent periods, even including Present-day English (cf. the overviews
and discussions in Núñez-Pertejo 2004); yet, it is clear that the progressive has
gone through some major changes. To date there are only a few principled accounts
of what path the progressive has developed along and why. In the present
paper I test one of these hypotheses, viz. the claim of Bertinetto et al. (2000)
that the English progressive has undergone ‘PROG imperfective drift’, originating
as a locative construction, to develop into a durative progressive and subsequently
also into a focalized progressive. I argue that the English progressive
has clearly become more focalized through time. However, if there was ever
a stage at which durative uses predominated, this stage goes so far back that
it cannot be traced even in the earliest written records. As for the origin of
the English progressive, the earliest data do not lend support to the ‘locative
hypothesis’.
The organization of the paper is as follows. In Section 2 I explain the concept
of PROG imperfective drift in some more detail. In Section 3 I discuss some
methodological issues, while Section 4 contains the data and analysis. Section 5
provides a summary and discussion.
2. Background: locative, durative and focalized progressives
and PROG imperfective drift
As mentioned above, Bertinetto et al. claim that the English progressive has
developed from being a locative, to becoming a durative and then increasingly a
focalized construction. To understand this hypothesis, we need to understand how
Bertinetto et al. define terms such as ‘locative’, ‘durative’ and ‘focalized’. I therefore
start by explaining the relevant terms.
According to Bertinetto et al. (2000: 539), ‘locative’ implies that the meaning
of the progressive was originally that of “being (i.e., finding oneself/itself) in a
state”. The locative element may be of various types:
2. Scholars that list a number of functions for the progressive seem to agree that of those functions
some are somehow basic, while others are derived or secondary; however, there is no consensus
as to which functions are basic and which derived.