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

82 Kristin Killie
(14) Ða dyde þe cniht swa moyses him bead þa he hit al isceawæd
then did the knight as Moses him bade when he it all seen
hæfde; þa cwæð he þt he nan þare ðingæ ʓyrnende nære
had then said he that he none of-the things yearning not-was
ðe he ðær iseah.
that he there saw
“Then, when he had seen it all, the knight did as Moses told him to. Then he
said that he did not yearn for any of the things that he saw there.”
(History of the Holy Rood-Tree; HCM1)
(15) & þider ʓe beoð ibrohte mid muriʓe lofsongum, & þær
and thither they are brought with merry praise and there
ʓe beoð mid me wuniende on heofene rice
they are with me living in heaven’s kingdom
“and there they are taken with merry praise, and there they will live with me in
heaven’s kingdom” (Bodley homilies; HCM1)
(16) Elmesʓeorn nes heo nefre. ah prud heo wes swiðe and
charitable not-was she never and proud she was very and
modi. and liʓere and swikel. and wreðful and ontful.
moody and deceitful and treacherous and angry and evil
and forði heo bið wuniende inne þisse pine.
and therefore she is remaining in this pain
“She was never charitable. She was very proud and moody, and deceitful and
treacherous, and angry and evil. And therefore she remains in this pain.”
(Lambeth Homilies; HCM1)
The Old English progressives involve a whole range of verbs. The most frequent
verb meanings are “fight” (feohtan, winnan; twenty-two occurrences); “live, remain”
(wunian, wesan; twenty occurrences), “go, travel” (faran, gan; seventeen
occurrences), and “speak” (sprecan; seventeen occurrences). Three of these are
dynamic meanings. The relevant meanings are poorly represented in the Middle
English data: “fight” and “go, travel” occur only two times each, while “speak” is
not represented at all.
It is clear, then, that there are some puzzling differences between the Old
English and Middle English subcorpora with regard to both the function of the
progressive and the verbs involved. Since the Middle English data show a somewhat
unexpected development, I decided to look more closely at the distribution
of the progressive across the various texts. What I found was that certain texts are
overrepresented in the data. More specifically, out of the eighty-eight Middle English
progressives, eleven are found in The history of the holy rood tree, nine in The earliest
complete English prose psalter, and eight in Vices and Virtues. Thus, the progressives
in these three texts alone constitute almost a third of the Middle English tokens.