6 - The progressive

Summary

Introduction

We now turn from mood and modality to a grammatical construction that is normally associated with the notion of aspect – that is, the manner in which the internal temporal constituency of a situation is represented. We refer to this construction by its most popular title, the progressive. It consists of a form of the verb be followed by a participle ending in -ing.

1. (1) I know where you're coming from.

2. (2) Have you been waiting long?

For a number of reasons the English progressive has been the subject of considerable scholarly interest. First, it is unclear how it originated. Second, over the last several centuries it has developed a rather complex meaning, or set of meanings, by comparison with progressive constructions in other languages (see Dahl 1985: 90, Bybee et al. 1994: 136). A third reason, probably resulting from the second, is that the progressive has enjoyed a meteoric increase in frequency in the Modern English period (see section 6.3).

So far, however, little empirical data has been adduced as to whether the trend of burgeoning growth has continued into the present period, and whether the two major varieties of English, AmE and BrE, have followed the same course in this respect.

This chapter focuses mainly on these last two questions. In doing so, it explores gross and genre-based frequencies in the Brown family and other contemporaneous corpora.