The spread of the progressive from dynamic to stative verbs started in the seventeenth century, and slowed down in the late twentieth century. The present study investigates recent change in the use ...of stative progressives in conversational British English from the early 1990s to the early 2010s. The analysis focuses on a total of 100 stative verb lemmata in the spoken, demographic sections of the original and new British National Corpus, restricted to a variable context where a progressive could potentially occur. Results indicate that overall, stative progressives have not become more frequent in the last twenty years, and that the group of stative verbs is highly heterogeneous. However, particular verbs, such as expect and think, do indeed combine more frequently with the progressive now, which could be the cause of the popular impression of the continuing spread of stative progressives. In addition to a frequency-based analysis, a distinctive collexeme analysis offers a more fine-grained analysis of the collostructional preferences of individual verb lemmata and semantic classes of stative verbs. This analysis reveals that the stative verbs are heterogenous and that the lemmata most distinctly associated with the progressive belong to the group of stance verbs.
Outer Circle varieties are commonly characterized as having wider use of the stative progressive; however, studies making this claim often fail to account for regional differences in verb‐phrase ...density. The present study remedies the methodological problem by focusing on the progressive vs. non‐progressive alternation, subjecting the data to a series of statistical analyses. The results indicate that we need to refine the term ‘wider use’ – it is critical that it is understood in the semantic sense of referring to extension to non‐delimited contexts, as the sense ‘more frequent use of stative progressives in Outer Circle varieties’ is not confirmed. Rather, the frequency data, the attraction patterns, and the alternation patterns all indicate that Indian English (IndE) differs from the other varieties investigated, including the other Outer Circle varieties, Singaporean (SgE), and Hong Kong (HKE).
This book showcases eleven studies dealing with corpora and the changing society. The theme of the volume reflects the fact that changes in society lead to changes in language and vice versa. ...Focusing on the English language, be it from Old English to the present, or a shorter time span in the immediate past, the contributors in this volume use a variety of corpus methods to address the two patterns of change. The cross-fertilization of cultural studies and corpus linguistics, we hope, is beneficial for both parties, as corpus linguistics offers a vast array of materials and methods to investigate cultural and societal change, while cultural studies provide the theoretical background on which to build our research. The studies included in the present volume illustrate the potential avenues and the merits of combining changing language and changing societies.
This corpus-based study focuses on the progressive:non-progressive alternation from a novel perspective, i.e. the effect of syntactic priming. We annotated a dataset of 5,000 progressive and ...non-progressive occurrences in ten different varieties of English from the
for variables such as Aktionsart categories and elements related to priming and subjected the data to a generalized linear mixed methods tree analysis. The results indicate that the progressive is most likely to occur in situations that are durative in nature and when they are preceded by another progressive; overall, we find some evidence of probabilistic indigenization with regard to the use of progressives in different varieties. However, while syntactic priming seems to play a role overall in the choice of the progressive over the non-progressive, we do not find evidence supporting the idea that priming may explain the use of non-standard stative progressives.
Previous corpus-based research on the progressive (be +v- ing) investigated it from a diachronic point of view or from the angle of World Englishes (WEs). However, factors such as its propensity to ...occur with animate subjects or its preference for dynamic verbs have not been studied in relation to the choice between progressive and simple aspect. As the progressive has been extended to stative verbs, we argue that a variationist study of the construction in WEs needs to take simple vps into account systematically, too, and investigate whether there is interaction between predictor variables underlying the progressive:simple choice. We use a probabilistic grammar approach to study progressives in newspaper writing across a broad range of WEs. We apply a tree and forest analysis to gauge the relative strength of the predictor variables variety, animacy, tense/modality, verb type and voice. Our results show that the core grammar for the progressive:simple choice is shared across all Englishes. The extension of progressives to stative verbs, in particular, does not result in statistically detectable effects. We argue that they nevertheless serve to give a very ‘local’ flavour to contact varieties as they are salient against the backdrop of the core grammar.
Abstract
This corpus-based study focuses on the alternation between progressive and non-progressive constructions in native and non-native varieties. We adopt a quantitative-qualitative approach ...starting with a collostructional analysis of the two constructions to assess association strengths between lexical verbs, semantic domains and Aktionsart categories on the one hand, and progressive and non-progressive constructions on the other hand. We then explore the constructions semantically and qualitatively. Overall, associations between the two constructions and Achievements and Accomplishments on the one hand, and semantic domains other than Activity or Existence on the other, do not unanimously influence writers’ constructional choices. Further, there may not be one single core meaning of the progressive, but rather a complex of meanings activated by the use of the progressive construction. Ultimately, we paint a multifaceted picture of the meanings of the progressive and show the benefit of combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to explore constructional semantics across Englishes.
This study focuses on the progressive vs. non-progressive alternation to revisit the debate on the ENL-ESL-EFL continuum (i.e. whether native (ENL) and nonnative (ESL/EFL) Englishes are dichotomous ...types of English or form a gradient continuum). While progressive marking is traditionally studied independently of its unmarked counterpart, we examine (i) how the grammatical contexts of both constructions systematically affect speakers’ constructional choices in ENL (American, British), ESL (Indian, Nigerian and Singaporean) and EFL (Finnish, French and Polish learner Englishes) and (ii) what light speakers’ varying constructional choices bring to the continuum debate. Methodologically, we use a clustering technique to group together individual varieties of English (i.e. to identify similarities and differences between those varieties) based on linguistic contextual features such as AKTIONSART, ANIMACY, SEMANTIC DOMAIN (of aspect-bearing lexical verb), TENSE, MODALITY and VOICE to assess the validity of the ENL-ESL-EFL classification for our data. Then, we conduct a logistic regression analysis (based on lemmas observed in both progressive and non-progressive constructions) to explore how grammatical contexts influence speakers’ constructional choices differently across English types. While, overall, our cluster analysis supports the ENL-ESL-EFL classification as a useful theoretical framework to explore cross-variety variation, the regression shows that, when we start digging into the specific linguistic contexts of (non-)progressive constructions, this classification does not systematically transpire in the data in a uniform manner. Ultimately, by including more than one statistical technique into their exploration of the continuum, scholars could avoid potential methodological biases.
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