Primed progressives? Predicting the progressive in World Englishes

Abstract

This corpus-based study focuses on the progressive:nonprogressive alternation from a novel perspective, i.e. the effect of syntactic priming. We an- notated a dataset of 5,000 progressive and nonprogressive occurrences in ten different varieties of English from the International Corpus of English for variables such as Aktionsart categories and elements related to priming and subjected the data to a generalized linear mixed methods tree analysis. The results indicate that the progressive is most likely to occur in situations that are durative in nature and when they are preceded by another progressive; overall, we find some evidence of probabilistic indigenization with regard to the use of progressives in different varieties. However, while syntactic priming seems to play a role overall in the choice of the progressive over the nonprogressive, we do not find evidence sup- porting the idea that priming may explain the use of nonstandard stative progressives.