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

76 Kristin Killie
ing of this periphrasis. Although Bertinetto et al. assume that the Present-day English
progressive goes back to the beon/wesan + Vende construction, I have also included
syntagms such as be in milking, be a-milking, and be milking of, which are considered
to be variants of the be + prep + Ving pattern since these appear to have a progressive
meaning. The fact that there are hybrid forms which apparently have elements of both
be on hunting and beon/wesan/be + Vende/ing, i.e., represent a mixture of verbal and
nominal elements (e.g., on feohtende wæron, cf. Elsness 1994: 23–24, n. 4), suggests
that the two constructions may have merged at some stage. There are only twenty-two
examples of the be on hunting construction in the Helsinki data. With one exception
(a late Middle English example), these uses are all from the Early Modern period.
They mostly have a focalized function, just like the majority of the be + prep + Ving
uses at this time. I have not kept these uses separate from the non-prepositional uses
as their impact on the statistics is negligible. The number of be + prep + Ving periphrases
in the supplementary Middle English corpus is also very small. There are six
occurrences: one from the 12th, one from the 14th and four from the 15th century.
The most useful diagnostics in distinguishing between durative and focalized
progressives have been adverbial collocates. Durative and focalized progressives
differ with respect to what adverbial collocates they take. Some examples of durative
adverbials are found in (2); others are e.g., since early this morning, until midnight,
during the uprising, gradually, etc. Focalized progressives may occur within a frame
construction (typically a when or as clause), as in (3). They may also collocate with
adverbials such as at the moment, now, still, etc. Time adverbials have been useful
in interpreting the function of many progressives; however, given that as many as
fifty-eight percent of the corpus progressives do not involve a time adverbial at all,
it follows that the context has often been all-important. 8
4. Analysis
4.1 Durative, focalized and other progressives in Old to Early
Modern English
It is clear that both durative and focalized progressives are found in all historical
periods of English. The sentences in (4)–(6) below are examples of durative
progressives taken from the Old English subcorpus.
8. Cf. Freckmann (1995) for a discussion of the adverbial collocates of progressives. Bertinetto
et al. also suggest other diagnostics for determining the function of progressives, but these have
not been very useful in the present study. For example, it is claimed that durative progressives
are more likely than focalized progressives to occur with the perfect, but given the scarcity of
perfect progressives in the periods under study, this diagnostic has not been of much help.