Ever moving on? The progressive in recent British English.

Author: Nicholas Smith

Source: Language and Computers, New Frontiers of Corpus Research. Papers from the Twenty First International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora Sydney 2000. PETERS, Pam, Peter COLLINS and Adam SMITH (Eds.) , pp. 316-329(14)

Publisher: Rodopi

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Abstract:

There is a fair degree of consensus that progressive aspect has undergone a substantial growth in use in late modern English, but so far few studies have systematically exploited corpus data to reveal the extent to which changes are still going on. The availability of 'matching' one-million word corpora of recent written English, namely the British LOB and FLOB corpora dating from 1961 and 1991 respectively, and their American counterparts Brown and Frown, allows some redressing of the balance: Mair and Hundt (1995) have found that in the newspaper sections of these corpora some functions of the progressive already existing in the 1960s become more common in the 1990s. This paper aims to extend the analysis by exploring the full versions of the British corpora, looking at a wider range of variables. The most striking rise in the progressive occurs in the present tense, where it is realised by a wider range of verb types (increasingly with a contracted auxiliary verb), and appears increasingly far more in main clauses than in subordinate clauses. However, as cautioned by Mair and Hundt, the impression of 'pure' grammatical change is somewhat clouded by evidence in the written corpora of stylistic change, in particular a drift towards more colloquial speech habits.

Document Type: Research article

Publication date: 2001-11-20

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