The progressive in present-day spoken English: real-time studies of its spread and functional diversification

Abstract: This book presents an up-to-date account of the use and most recent developments of the progressive construction in present-day spoken British English. Drawing on corpus data from the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English, the new Freiburg Corpus of Spoken English, the British National Corpus and the recently released Spoken British National Corpus 2014, it is revealed that the progressive’s long-term frequency increase is still continuing in the 21st century.

Taking into account the factors genre, morphosyntactic context and the construction’s development with different verbs and verb classes, this study not only quantifies the progressive’s ongoing frequency development but also accounts for the underlying driving forces. It is shown that increasing progressive frequencies are based on two major developments: first, further expansion of prototypical core uses and, second, increasing readiness to use the progressive in contexts in which its use has not been obligatory so far (for example with perception/sensation verbs).

Furthermore, the present study analyses frequent lexical-grammatical patterns of progressive use (e.g. I BE just -ing). Focusing on their recent frequency development and specific discourse-pragmatic meanings, it can be shown that different patterns have reached different degrees of routinisation in the speech community. While some even exhibit signs of advanced or completed constructionalization (e.g. the reduced form just saying), others retain much closer ties with the progressive’s basic aspectual meaning

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• Location: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt am Main
• Extent: Online-Ressource
• Language: Englisch
• Notes: Universität Freiburg, Dissertation, 2019

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Englisch
• Keyword: Paul, Hermann ; Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg ; British National Corpus ; Time ; Korpus ; Konstruktionsgrammatik

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (where): Freiburg
• (who): Universität
• (when): 2019
• Creator: Rohe, Udo Julius
• Contributor: Mair, Christian ; Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Philologische Fakultät

Further information

• DOI: 10.6094/978-3-928969-77-2
• URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:25-freidok-1508583
• Rights: Der Zugriff auf das Objekt ist unbeschränkt möglich.