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

The English progressive 79
We see that focalized progressives are more frequent than durative ones in
all the three subperiods under study. It is nevertheless clear that the difference
in frequency between the two types increases over time. Thus, while the ratio
of durative to focalized progressives is approximately one to two in the Old
and Middle English data, the corresponding Early Modern rate is one to nine.
The data are thus compatible with the hypothesis that the English progressive
used to be more durative, but has over time developed into a prototypically
focalized construction. However, given the rather low frequency of durative
progressives even in the earliest data, a development from prototypically durative
to prototypically focalized presupposes that the first stages of this development
took place before the time of the written records. On the other hand, it is
also possible that the English progressive was never a predominantly durative
construction. In any event, there is no doubt that the construction has become
much more focalized with time. There has also been a clear increase in the use
of the frame construction during the time span under study. Frame uses are
highly infrequent in Old and Middle English, while they constitute almost eighteen
percent of the tokens in the Early Modern period. However, such uses are
hardly frequent enough to be referred to as prototypical, at this stage at least.
Thus, if Jespersen is at all right in claiming that the frame construction represents
the prototypical use of the English progressive, this must be a relatively
recent development.
The rise in the use of focalized progressives and the decrease in the use of
durative progressives may be seen as a result of the increased grammaticalization
of the English progressive as an aspectual, focalizing device. The sharp decrease
in the use of the progressive in other functions is of course another important
aspect of this process; the more the progressive was conceived of as an aspectual
device, the less likely it was to be used as a non-aspectual device. However, judging
from the data in Table 1, the grammaticalization of the English progressive
was not a tidy and linear development. In particular, there is a puzzling fall in the
use of focalized progressives between Old and Middle English, from twenty-eight
to nineteen percent, and from 1.7 to 0.3 occurrences per 10,000 words. This decrease
is not due to a rise in the use of durative constructions in Middle English;
instead, the data show an increase in the category ‘other’. In order to determine
whether this rise was caused by a specific type of use, which came to be favoured
by Middle English writers, I decided to carry out a more fine-grained analysis of
the progressives in this category. Another good reason for doing this is the fact
that the ‘other/indeterminate’ category is by far the largest category in the Old and
Middle English data, so a further subdivision of the relevant progressives seemed
pertinent in order to better understand the history of the progressive. The result of
the analysis is displayed in Table 2.