Grammaticalization by changing co-text frequencies, or why [BE Ving] became the ‘progressive’

Abstract

While the ‘progressive’ construction [BE Ving] (Hewas playing tenniswhen Jane came in) has been studied extensively both diachronically and synchronically, studies of its functional development tend not to extend further back than Early Modern English. This article draws attention to the functional changes [BE Ving] goes through already in Middle English, whose analysis sheds new light on the principles of early grammaticalization. To understand the observed changes, all uses of [BE Ving] are considered, not only those that have a clear verbal and aspectual function. During Middle English, important changes occurred in the frequencies of the various co-texts of [BE Ving]. They involve the increase in backgrounding adverbial clauses, which leads to the semanticization of ongoingness, a feature that was initially only associated with [BE Ving] by pragmatic implicature. The outcome is grammaticalization by co-text: co-textual changes paved the way for the acquisition of progressive semantics in [BE Ving] itself.

The extravagant progressive: an experimental corpus study on the history of emphatic [beVing]

“…Research suggests that [ be V ing ] in present-tense main clauses was indeed less expected, less familiar than the simple present in the seventeenth century, and was at the time more frequent in past-tense subordinate clauses (see Petré 2016a; Wright 1994: 468; Fitzmaurice 2004 sees a similar development with so-called ‘subjective progressives’). Starting from this observation, the central hypothesis of this article is as follows: The initial use of [ be V ing ] in present-tense main clauses was motivated by a desire for making one's expression cognitively more salient, i.e.…”

“…The case study I will look into is that of a specific extension of the use of the [ be V ing ] construction, which, barring some early forerunners, occurred around 1600 (Petré 2016a; earlier literature, such as Wright 1994; Fitzmaurice 2004, tended to place this development later in time). The specific extension is that of [ be V ing ] to present-tense main clause contexts, where the construction construes an event as ongoing at the time of speaking, as in the two sentences in (1).…”

“…Today the progressive function of [ be V ing ] is also its main function, but this was not always the case. Petré (2016a) explains how this function developed out of an originally stative one. Indeed, up to the Old English period, [ be V ing ] was predominantly a member of the group of copular constructions introduced by the copula be , in which the participle behaved like an adjective in both form and function.…”

“…Figure 1 shows the distribution of unambiguously progressive uses of [ be V ing ] over tense through time.

Figure 1. Tense of progressive [ be V ing ], frequencies per million words (graph adopted from Petré 2016a; data from LEON 0.3 [Petré 2013])

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“…Tense of progressive [ be V ing ], frequencies per million words (graph adopted from Petré 2016a; data from LEON 0.3 [Petré 2013])…”