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The extravagant progressive: an experimental corpus study on the history of emphatic [be Ving]1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2017

PETER PETRÉ
PETER PETRÉ*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Antwerp, Stadscampus, Prinsstraat 13 S.R.229, 2000 Antwerpen, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article combines methodologies from corpus linguistics with an experimental-like setup more affiliated to psycholinguistic research. The resulting methodology allows us to gain more insight into cognitive motivations of language use in speakers from the past, and consequently to better assess their similarity to present-day speakers (the Uniformitarian Principle). One such cognitive motivation thought to be relevant in the early stages of grammatical constructionalization (grammaticalization) is covered by the evasive concept of ‘extravagance’ (i.e. the desire to talk in such a way that one is noticed). The methodology is tested on the Early Modern English extension of the [be Ving]-construction to progressive uses in present-tense main clauses. It is argued, on the basis of recurrent contextual clues, that [be Ving] in this novel use is motivated by extravagance. Interestingly, a comparison of two speaker/writer generations that are among the earliest to use this innovation with some frequency suggests that the encoding of extravagance shifted between them. At first, extravagance was signalled by coercion of the still stative semantics of [be Ving] into a progressive reading. In the second generation it had become an entrenched characteristic of the construction itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 21 , Special Issue 2: Cognitive approaches to the history of English , July 2017 , pp. 227 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

1

The research reported on in this article was funded by the Special Research Fund (BOF) from the Flemish Government, and is part of the project Mind-Bending Grammars, funded by the ERC Horizon 2020 programme (Project ID 639008; www.uantwerpen.be/mind-bending-grammars/). Both institutions are hereby gratefully acknowledged. I also would like to thank two reviewers for their generous comments, from which the article has benefited a great deal.

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