ALWAYS-progressives in early American English

Abstract

One of the contexts of expansion of progressive forms in Late Modern English (along with others that were later equally, or even more, successful; see e.g. Fitzmaurice 2004; Smitterberg 2005; Nesselhauf 2007) is the habitual – iterative context, in which the form co-occurs with always and other markers of iterativity or continuity such as constantly, every day, etc., and often convey expressive pragmatic values such as irritation, impatience, and the like. This context is nowadays quite common, although it stands in contrast with the “progressive” core meaning. The precise conditions for its spread and constraints on its occurrence, however, are still debated (e.g. Killie 2004, Kranich 2007, 2008), and not much has been ascertained about its distribution.

It is known that American English shows a higher number of contexts in which be + Ving forms are used than British English, and that the ratio of the frequency increase of this construction is also higher in Atlantic Englishes as well as in other ‘transplanted’ varieties. The same can be said about the specific verbs that accept the construction, as these, too, seem to be in greater number in other L1 varieties than in Standard British English (see e.g. Collins 2008). Whether this has any connection with the ‘subjective’ progressive referred to in the previous paragraph, however, still remains to be ascertained. The present paper will therefore explore early American English texts spanning over the century 1810-1909 (from the Corpus Of Historical American English) for occurrences of this construction, trying to verify the hypothesis that this is one of the main loci of extension of the subjective uses of the –ing finite form in Late Modern English, and that it is therefore crucial in order to account for the present remarkable frequency of the latter in transatlantic varieties. Comparison with the 20th-century part of the COHA will also be provided and discussed.