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