Buch, Englisch, Band 06, 200 Seiten
with Special Reference to the Early Modern English Period: A Corpus-Based Study
Buch, Englisch, Band 06, 200 Seiten
Reihe: LINCOM Studies in English Linguistics
ISBN: 978-3-89586-742-2
Verlag: LINCOM
Attention is devoted to the role played by temporal adverbials in combination with be + ing, to so-called 'non-progressive verbs', and also to the traditional dichotomy progressive vs. non-progressive (simple) forms.
Throughout the subsequent chapters, the history of the English progressive from Old English to early Modern English is traced on the basis of different parameters, such as paradigm, frequency, distribution and semantics, among others. Other issues included in these chapters are the origin of Old English
beon/wesan + -ende, the origin of Middle English be + -ing, the change from Old English -end(e) to Middle English -ing(e) and the development of the gerund in Middle English. As indicated above, the chapter which focuses on the use of the progressive in early Modern English offers data from the Helsinki Corpus. All the examples are classified and studied according to various factors, both linguistic and extralinguistic, including chronology, frequency, paradigm and semantics, as well as their distribution in terms of the type of clause selected and the text type. Finally, the book includes a chapter which summarizes the main conclusions reached.