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

The English progressive 75
situation as if it were spatial, when it is quite natural to refer to some specific
point of the situation as being ‘in’ that situation. Thus really, the only requirement
is that we should be able to transpose from space to time, and languages do
this quite readily already in the use of originally locative prepositions, etc., as
temporal, e.g., on the table, on Friday. (Comrie 1976: 102–103)
The development sketched in Fig. 1 is based mainly on studies of progressive
constructions in the Romance languages, but it is claimed that progressive devices
in other languages have followed the same course, and this includes the English
progressive (Bertinetto et al. 2000: 540 and Johanson 2000: 99–100). However,
Bertinetto et al. present no evidence for their claim that the English progressive
has developed along these lines. The present paper aims to test the relevant
hypothesis by providing the necessary quantitative data, but before I discuss the
data, a few methodological comments are in order.
3. Corpus and methodology
If the English progressive has gone through PROG imperfective drift, this should
be reflected in a shift in the relative proportions of the various types of progressives.
I therefore present evidence showing the proportions of the relevant types in different
periods of English. The periods covered are Old English (> 1150), Middle English
(1150–1500), and Early Modern English (1500–1710). The data come from the
historical part of the Helsinki Corpus. I have also used six additional Middle English
texts (see section 4.1 and the references). Note that the data and discussion focus on
the possible shift from a prototypically durative to a prototypically focalized construction.
I nevertheless briefly discuss the question of origins in section 4.2.
Although the study focuses on the shift from a prototypically durative to a prototypically
focalized progressive, the data include progressives with other meanings
or functions as well, notably ‘narrative’ and ‘stative’ progressives, which are
clearly non-aspectual (cf. the discussion in section 4). Such uses are not included
in Bertinetto et al.’s diachronic sketch of progressives; however, they should have a
place in our discussion as they represent a common use of the English progressive
historically and are therefore a part of the total picture. 7 The tables in Section 4
therefore include such uses of the progressive as well.
In this study the term ‘progressive’ refers to any verbal use of be + Vende/ing in
which the first and second element form a verbal periphrasis, regardless of the mean-
7. They also feature quite prominently in the history of many other European progressive constructions
(cf. the discussion in Poppe 2003), and should therefore, in my view, somehow have
been included in Bertinetto et al.’s diagram.