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

84 Kristin Killie
is, of course, not unusual when a construction is undergoing grammaticalization,
which the progressive was clearly doing in Middle English. The totals for focalized
and stative progressives in Table 3 diverge sharply from the corresponding Middle
English figures in Table 2, with focalized and stative progressives emerging as equally
frequent in Table 3. The data in Table 3 probably give us a more representative
picture of the use of the progressive in Middle English. They indicate that the progressive
was becoming steadily more focalized between Old and Early Modern
English. By contrast, the figures in Table 1 and 2 seem to suggest that this development
was reversed in the Middle English period. What all the texts in Table 3 have
in common is a low incidence of durative progressives. As we have seen, this is a
feature they share with the Middle English texts in the Helsinki Corpus.
4.2 The origin of the progressive
As we have seen, not only Bertinetto et al., but also a number of other scholars
believe that the English progressive has developed out of a locative construction.
The majority of these scholars identify this locative construction as the be on hunting
construction. Bertinetto et al., by contrast, claim that the beon/wesan + Vende
periphrasis itself was originally locative. They do not discuss this issue in any detail,
however, and the scope of this paper prevents me from embarking on such a
discussion. Suffice it to say here that in my view, the very varied semantics of the
progressive in the Old English subcorpus indicates that the English progressive
does not have a locative origin, or at least its origin could not have been exclusively
locative. As noted by Ziegeler (1999), the locative hypothesis presupposes that the
progressive was first used with activity/agentive verbs only and then later spread to
other types of contexts, including stative ones. Such a hypothesis therefore cannot
explain the large number of stative progressives in Old English. If we assume that
locative uses were reanalysed into aspectual progressives, as seems to be the standard
assumption, the locative hypothesis does not seem to account for the large
number of narrative progressives in Old English either. The multi-facetedness of
the progressive may be at least partly due to the fact that the construction represents
a blend of (at least) two sources, viz. the subjective/expressive beon/wesan +
Vende, which was a textual or expressive device, and which was only used in writing,
and the aspectual be on hunting, which was used in speech (Hübler 1998: 90;
cf. the discussion in Smitterberg 2005: 59–60). This hypothesis is compatible with
the analysis of the progressive proposed by Rydén (1997). According to Rydén, the
basic meaning of the progressive is that of ‘dynamic process’. This meaning has two
‘facets’ – one ‘action-focussed’ and one ‘attitude-focussed’, the former corresponding
to the actional and aspectual uses of the progressive, the latter “subsuming
‘evaluation’, ‘interpretation’, ‘tentativeness’, or other ‘modal’ aspects” (1997: 421).