Subjectivity and the English progressive

Abstract

According to Wright (1994a), subjectivity in the English progressive is typically associated with specific linguistic features. In particular, subjective progressives are said normally to occur in main clauses and to involve an adverb(ial) of the type always, a first- or second-person pronominal subject and a private or cognitive verb in the present tense. This study tests Wright's claim against a corpus of Early Modern English prose. The focus is on the kind of subjective progressives that are claimed by Wright to be most subjective of all, namely collocations of the progressive with adverbs such as always. It is shown that the ‘always progressives’ in the corpus are typically found in a subclause, in collocation with an activity verb, and that they commonly occur with different types of subjects and tense/mood combinations. The conclusion is therefore that Wright's predictions concerning typical linguistic contexts for subjective progressives are not borne out.

In lack of ‘Will’? Strategic ‘Future-ness’ and Barack Obama’s experiment: From intention negotiation to will creation and political action in Barack Obama’s e-mail campaigning

“…Figure 2: identity enhanced + centrality of the subject), which appears to be reflected in the tendency Anglophone (or English-speaking) cultures have with respect to myths like, say, individual choice, which seems to be even more radical in American English and Culture (Stewart and Bennet, 1991: 133) than British. Whether this move can be considered part of the more general semantic-pragmatic process of “subjectification” (Traugott, 1995: 31; 1989: 35), leading towards a greater tendency to express the ‘self’, which according to Glaser (2001) has been going on since the 17th century (Killie, 2004: 26), is beyond the scope of this article. What instead we are focusing on is the specificity of the process and how strategic it might be with respect to the construction and definition of discoursal identities.…”

The Hypothesis of Change from Above in the History of English: State of the Art and Perspectives

“…A well-known example of studies that tried to identify the role of change from above concerns studies of the English passive progressive. Even though there is consensus that the development of the English progressive should be analyzed as a change from below, many scholars have emphasized the adoption of the passive progressive as conscious use of a restricted group of speakers, the Coleridge-Southey circle (Denison 1993;Pratt & Denison 2000;Killie 2004).…”

A Comparison of Progressive Be V‐Ing With Be In The Middle, Midst, Process or Act Of V‐Ing: The Interaction Of Lexical And Grammatical Progressive Aspect

“…In examples (22a–b) be V ‐ing is used to ‘suggest that the speaker feels rather doubtful or uncertain (…) in order to make the sentence more tentative, hence more polite’ (Declerck : 163) and to put less ‘pressure on the listener’ (Declerck : 166). This nearly epistemic function of the progressive form has alternatively been called the ‘experiential’, ‘non‐factive’ progressive (Fitzmaurice ), the ‘emotional colouring’ function of the progressive (Onions : 113) and the ‘attitude‐focused’ (instead of aspectual, action‐focused), subjective (Killie ) or affective progressive (Rydén ). The expression of uncertainty and tentativeness of the speaker in be V ‐ing most probably has its origins in the power of the grammatical progressive to recount a situation as durative instead of eternally static, that is, as having limited duration.…”