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Progressive or simple?: a corpus-based study of aspect in World Englishes

Hundt, Marianne; Rautionaho, Paula; Strobl, Carolin (2020). Progressive or simple?: a corpus-based study of aspect in World Englishes. Corpora, 15(1):77-106.

Abstract

Previous corpus-based research on the progressive (BE+V-ing) investigated it from a diachronic point of view or from the angle of World Englishes (WEs). However, factors such as its propensity to occur with animate subjects or its preference for dynamic verbs have not been studied in relation to the choice between progressive and simple aspect. As the progressive has been extended to stative verbs, we argue that a variationist study of the construction in WEs needs to take simple VPs into account systematically, too, and investigate whether there is interaction between predictor variables underlying the progressive:simple choice. We use a probabilistic grammar approach to study progressives in newspaper writing across a broad range of WEs. We apply a tree and forest analysis to gauge the relative strength of the predictor variables ‘regional variety’, ‘animacy’, ‘tense/modality’, ‘verb type’ and ‘voice’. Our results show that the core grammar for the progressive:simple choice is shared across all Englishes. The extension of
progressives to stative verbs, in particular, does not result in statistically detectable effects. We argue that they nevertheless serve to give a very ‘local’ flavour to contact varieties as they are salient against the backdrop of the core grammar.

Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:06 Faculty of Arts > English Department
06 Faculty of Arts > Zurich Center for Linguistics
08 Research Priority Programs > Language and Space
Dewey Decimal Classification:400 Language
410 Linguistics
Scopus Subject Areas:Social Sciences & Humanities > Language and Linguistics
Social Sciences & Humanities > Linguistics and Language
Language:English
Date:2020
Deposited On:26 Nov 2019 14:24
Last Modified:22 Oct 2024 01:38
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
ISSN:1749-5032
OA Status:Closed
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2020.0186
Project Information:
  • Funder: SNF
  • Grant ID: IKZ0Z1_164111
  • Project Title: Progressively progressive? A corpus-based study of the progressive in World Englishes
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