Grammatical Evolution of the English Progressive Construction: A Diachronic Discussion
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.20420/Phil.Can.2021.373Keywords:
English historical linguistics, morphosyntactic analysis, grammaticalization, constructional change, constructionalizationAbstract
In this paper we bring forward a comprehensive discussion on the grammatical development of the English progressive construction. From a set of progressive prototypes drawn from the family of corpora York-Toronto-Helsinki-Penn, we exemplify how the lexical and grammatical configuration of the construction which is characteristic of Present-Day English appears since Old English. Furthermore, we explain how the syntactic evolution of English enables the establishment of the obligatory grammatical nature of the verbal periphrastic construction. Finally, we explain how the grammatical patterns and the semantic and pragmatic features that describe the English progressive construction in the course of its evolution are manifested apparently through a functional-morphosyntactic and grammatical change gradient.
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