Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T10:56:04.596Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Standing out with the progressive

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2020

ASTRID DE WIT ,
PETER PETRÉ  and
FRANK BRISARD
ASTRID DE WIT*
Affiliation:
University of Antwerp
PETER PETRÉ*
Affiliation:
University of Antwerp
FRANK BRISARD*
Affiliation:
University of Antwerp
*
Author’s address: Department of Linguistics, University of Antwerp, Grote Kauwenberg 18, S.D.329, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium[email protected]
Author’s address: [email protected]
Author’s address: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this paper we demonstrate on the basis of diachronic and synchronic data from a variety of languages that progressives are particularly liable to be used for the expression of extravagance. We define extravagant language use as a signaling mechanism that consists in the exploitation of an unconventional construction in a given context as a way for speakers to indicate that there is something non-canonical about the situation that they are reporting. Novel constructions naturally lend themselves to such extravagant exploitation, since they are by definition to a certain extent unconventional. This is why, as we will demonstrate, the English, Dutch and French progressives were notably often recruited in extravagant contexts at the onset of their development. However, our synchronic data reveal that Present-day English, Dutch and French progressives continue to be used for extravagant purposes, which suggests that there is something inherent about progressive aspect that makes it liable to such expressive usage. This is confirmed by data from other, typologically diverse languages. We offer a cognitive-semantic analysis in terms of epistemic contingency in order to account for this intrinsic association of progressive aspect and extravagance across languages. Our analysis thus reveals that extravagance is not a transient property of emerging progressives, but that, instead, the semantics of these constructions makes them particularly liable to be recruited for extravagant purposes. It also demonstrates that in order to analyze the range of uses of progressive constructions in a unified fashion, we need to look beyond the temporal import of these constructions.

Keywords

aspectextravagancemodalityprogressive
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 56 , Issue 3: Aspect beyond time , 01 August 2020 , pp. 479 - 514
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We wish to thank the three anonymous referees for the Journal of Linguistics for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Peter Petré also wishes to acknowledge the ERC, whose Horizon 2020 programme made possible the research reported on in Sections 2.1–2.2 (Project ID 639008; www.uantwerpen.be/mind-bending-grammars/).

References

Altshuler, Daniel. 2010. Meaning of ‘now’ and other temporal location adverbs. In Aloni, Maria, Bastiaanse, Harald, de Jager, Tikitu & Schulz, Katrin (eds.), Logic, language and meaning: 17th Amsterdam Colloquium, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, December 16–18, 2009, revised selected papers, 183–192. Berlin: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anthonissen, Lynn, De Wit, Astrid & Mortelmans, Tanja. 2016. Aspect meets modality: A semantic analysis of the German am-progressive. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 28.1, 1–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anthonissen, Lynn, De Wit, Astrid & Mortelmans, Tanja. 2019. (Inter)subjective uses of the Dutch progressive constructions. Linguistics 57.5, 1111–1159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Austin, John L. 1962. How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bertinetto, Pier Marco. 2000. The progressive in Romance, as compared with English. In Dahl, Östen (ed.), Tense and aspect in the languages of Europe, 559–604. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Borshi, Orkida. 2011. A comparison of progressive forms in English and Albanian. Linguistica Pragensia 21, 70–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Branca-Rosoff, Sonia, Fleury, Serge, Lefeuvre, Florence & Pires, Mat. 2012. Discours sur la ville. Corpus de Français Parlé Parisien des années 2000 (CFPP2000). http://cfpp2000.univ-paris3.fr/CFPP2000.pdf (accessed 7 December 2019).Google Scholar
Breed, Adri, Brisard, Frank & Verhoeven, Ben. 2017. Periphrastic progressive constructions in Dutch and Afrikaans: A contrastive analysis. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 29, 305–378.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brisard, Frank. 2002. The English present. In Brisard, Frank (ed.), Grounding: The epistemic footing of deixis and reference, 251–297. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect: An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cryer, Max. 2010. Who said that first? Auckland: Exisle.Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2008–. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words, 1990–present. Available online at https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/(accessed 7 December 2019).Google Scholar
De Wit, Astrid. 2017a. The present perfective paradox across languages (Oxford Studies of Time in Language and Thought). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
De Wit, Astrid. 2017b. The expression of mirativity through aspectual constructions. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 15, 385–410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Wit, Astrid & Brisard, Frank. 2014. A Cognitive Grammar account of the semantics of the English present progressive. Journal of Linguistics 50, 49–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Wit, Astrid, Brisard, Frank & Meeuwis, Michael. 2018. The epistemic import of aspectual constructions: The case of performatives. Language and Cognition 10, 234–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Wit, Astrid & Michaelis, Laura. 2018. Inflectional constructions and the meaning of progressive performatives in English. Presented at the International Conference on Construction Grammar 10, Sorbonne Nouvelle University – Paris 3.Google Scholar
De Wit, Astrid & Patard, Adeline. 2013. Modality, aspect and the progressive: The semantics of the present progressive in French in comparison with English. Languages in Contrast 13, 113–132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Wit, Astrid, Patard, Adeline & Brisard, Frank. 2013. A contrastive analysis of the present progressive in French and English. Studies in Language 37, 846–879.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Defour, Tine. 2007. A diachronic study of the pragmatic markerswell and now: Fundamental research into semantic development and grammaticalisation by means of a corpus study. Ph.D. dissertation, Ghent University.Google Scholar
Detges, Ulrich & Waltereit, Richard. 2002. Grammaticalization vs. reanalysis: A semantic-pragmatic account of functional change in grammar. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 21, 151–195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dik, Simon C.1997. The theory of Functional Grammar, vol.1: The structure of the clause, 2nd, revised edition, edited by Kees Hengeveld. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Do-Hurinville, Danh Thành. 2007. Etude sémantique et syntaxique de être en train de[A semantic and syntactic study of être en train de]. L’information grammaticale 113, 32–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donabédian-Demopoulos, Anaïd. 2012. Evidentiel et progressif: Quel statut grammatical pour la saillance prédicative? [The evidential and the progressive: What is that grammatical status of predicative salience?]. Faits de Langues 39.1, 62–82.Google Scholar
Emenanjo, E. Nolue. 1987. Elements of modern Igbo grammar: A descriptive approach. Ibadan: University Press.Google Scholar
Franckel, Jean-Jacques. 1989. Etude de quelques marqueurs aspectuels du français [A study of a few aspectual markers in French]. Genève: Droz.Google Scholar
Goldsmith, John & Woisetschlaeger, Erich F.. 1982. The logic of the English progressive. Linguistic Inquiry 13, 79–89.Google Scholar
Gras, Pedro. 2016. Revisiting the functional typology of insubordination: Insubordinate que-constructions in Spanish. In Evans, Nicholas (ed.), Insubordination, 113–144. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Güldemann, Tom. 2003. Present progressive vis-à-vis predication focus in Bantu: A verbal category between semantics and pragmatics. Studies in Language 27, 323–360.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haiman, John. 2014. Decorative morphology in Khmer. In Williams, Jeffrey P. (ed.), The aesthetics of grammar: Sound and meaning in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia, 61–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 1999. Why is grammaticalization irreversible? Linguistics 37, 1043–1068.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hengeveld, Kees. 2011. The grammaticalization of tense and aspect. In Heine, Bernd & Narrog, Heiko (eds.), The Oxford handbook of grammaticalization, 580–594. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hommerberg, Charlotte & Paradis, Carita. 2014. Constructing credibility through representations in the discourse of wine: Evidentiality, temporality and epistemic control. In Glynn, Dylan & Sjölin, Mette (eds.), Subjectivity and epistemicity: Corpus, discourse, and literary approaches to stance, 211–238. Lund: Lund University Press.Google Scholar
Joseph, Brian D.2011. The puzzle of Albanian po. Oslo Studies in Language (Indo-European Syntax and Pragmatics: Contrastive Approaches) 3, 27–40.Google Scholar
Keller, Rudi. 1994. On language change: The invisible hand in language. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul & Condoravdi, Cleo. 2006. Tracking Jespersen’s cycle. In Brian Joseph, Mark Janse & Ralli, Angela (eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory, 172–197. Patras: University of Patras.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1: Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 2: Descriptive application. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 2001. The English present tense. English Language and Linguistics 5, 251–273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 2011. The English present. In Patard, Adeline & Brisard, Frank (eds.), Cognitive approaches to tense, aspect and epistemic modality, 45–86. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey. 2004. Meaning and the English verb. Harlow: Pearson.Google Scholar
Lemmens, Maarten. 2005. Aspectual posture verb constructions in Dutch. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 17, 183–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ljung, Magnus. 1980. Reflections on the English progressive. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.Google Scholar
Michaelis, Laura A. 2004. Type shifting in Construction Grammar: An integrated approach to aspectual coercion. Cognitive Linguistics 15, 1–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michaelis, Laura A. 2011. Stative by construction. Linguistics 49, 1359–1399.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mortier, Liesbeth. 2008. An analysis of progressive aspect in French and Dutch in terms of variation and specialization. Languages in Contrast 8, 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newmark, Leonard, Hubbard, Philip & Prifti, Peter. 1982. Standard Albanian: A reference grammar for students. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Petré, Peter. 2016. Grammaticalization by changing co-text frequencies, or why [beVing] became the ‘progressive’. English Language and Linguistics 20, 31–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petré, Peter. 2017. The extravagant progressive: An experimental corpus study on the history of emphatic [beVing]. English Language and Linguistics 21, 227–250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petré, Peter, Anthonissen, Lynn, Budts, Sara, Manjavacas, Enrique, Silva, Emma-Louise, Standing, William & Strik, Odile A. O.. 2019. Early Modern Multiloquent Authors (EMMA): Designing a large-scale corpus of individuals’ languages. ICAME Journal 43, 83–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petré, Peter, Anthonissen, Lynn, Budts, Sara, Manjavacas, Enrique, Standing, William, Silva, Emma-Louise & Strik, Oscar A. O.. 2018. Early-Modern Multiloquent Authors (EMMA). Antwerp: Linguistics Dept. https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/projects/mind-bending-grammars/emma-corpus/ (accessed 7 December 2019).Google Scholar
Potts, Christopher. 2007. The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 33, 165–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pusch, Claus D. 2003. La grammaticalisation de l’aspectualité: Les périphrases à valeur progressive en français [The grammaticalisation of aspect: Periphrastic progressive constructions in French]. Verbum 25, 495–508.Google Scholar
Smith, Carlota S. 1997. The parameter of aspect, 2nd edn.Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, K. Aaron. 2007. The development of the English progressive. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 19, 205–241.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smitterberg, Erik. 2005. The progressive in 19th-century English: A process of integration. Amsterdam: Rodopi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van den Toorn, M. C.1975. Het probleem van een syntactische verandering (over enkele werkwoorden van aspect en te + infinitief) [The problem of a syntactic change (on a few aspectual verbs and the to-infinitive)]. Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 91, 256–267.Google Scholar
van der Horst, Joop. 2005. Progressief aan het + infinitief [The progressive at the + infinitive]. In Arend Quak & Tanneke Schoonheim (eds.), Gehugdic sis samnungun thinro: Liber amicorum W.J.J. Pijnenburg], 131–140. Groningen: Gopher.Google Scholar
van der Horst, Joop. 2008. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse syntaxis [A history of Dutch syntax]. Louvain: Universitaire Pers.Google Scholar
van Gelderen, Elly. 2017. Changes in aspect. Presented at the Beyond Time workshop, University of Colorado at Boulder.Google Scholar