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The pattern to be a-hunting from Middle to Late Modern English

Towards extrapolating from Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary
  • Manfred Markus
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Corpus Interrogation and Grammatical Patterns
This chapter is in the book Corpus Interrogation and Grammatical Patterns

Abstract

The English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905), in its digitised beta-version EDD Online, allows for the retrieval of the gerund construction to be on verbing, generally in the reduced form to be a-verbing. The pattern was so much alive in the period covered by the EDD, 1700 to 1900, that its frequency can be hypothetically seen as an indicator of its role in the preceding centuries back to Late Middle English, even though evidence of its occurrence then has always been scarce. This paper’s extrapolation from Late Modern English back to Middle English is triggered by a striking similarity of distribution: to be a-verbing is documented by the EDD for all British regions except the English North, which is the very part where the participles of the progressive form to be verbing in Middle English had, according to Mossé (1925: 78), the deviant suffix –ande. My paper tries to explain this strange correlation, also throwing light on the competition from the progressive, which was the accepted form of the written standard, whereas to be a-verbing was the colloquial and dialectal variant.

Abstract

The English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905), in its digitised beta-version EDD Online, allows for the retrieval of the gerund construction to be on verbing, generally in the reduced form to be a-verbing. The pattern was so much alive in the period covered by the EDD, 1700 to 1900, that its frequency can be hypothetically seen as an indicator of its role in the preceding centuries back to Late Middle English, even though evidence of its occurrence then has always been scarce. This paper’s extrapolation from Late Modern English back to Middle English is triggered by a striking similarity of distribution: to be a-verbing is documented by the EDD for all British regions except the English North, which is the very part where the participles of the progressive form to be verbing in Middle English had, according to Mossé (1925: 78), the deviant suffix –ande. My paper tries to explain this strange correlation, also throwing light on the competition from the progressive, which was the accepted form of the written standard, whereas to be a-verbing was the colloquial and dialectal variant.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. List of contributors ix
  5. Interrogating corpora to describe grammatical patterns 1
  6. Part 1. Patterns in the verb phrase
  7. Light verb constructions in the history of English 15
  8. What happened to the English prefix, and could it stage a comeback? 35
  9. The pattern to be a-hunting from Middle to Late Modern English 57
  10. The present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English 81
  11. can and be able to in nineteenth-century Irish English 105
  12. Part 2. Patterns in the noun phrase
  13. Syntactic constraints on the use of dual form intensifiers in Modern English 131
  14. Ma daddy wis dead chuffed 151
  15. The case of focus 173
  16. Part 3. Patterns in complementation structures
  17. Null objects and sentential complements, with evidence from the Corpus of Historical American English 209
  18. A new angle on infinitival and of - ing complements of afraid , with evidence from the TIME Corpus 223
  19. Active and passive infinitive, ambiguity and non-canonical subject with ready 239
  20. Part 4. Patterns of clause combining
  21. The diffusion of English absolutes 265
  22. It-clefts in English L1 and L2 academic writing 295
  23. The speech functions of tag questions and their properties. A comparison of their distribution in COLT and LLC 321
  24. Author index 351
  25. Subject index 355
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.63.07mar

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. List of contributors ix
  5. Interrogating corpora to describe grammatical patterns 1
  6. Part 1. Patterns in the verb phrase
  7. Light verb constructions in the history of English 15
  8. What happened to the English prefix, and could it stage a comeback? 35
  9. The pattern to be a-hunting from Middle to Late Modern English 57
  10. The present perfect and the preterite in Late Modern and Contemporary English 81
  11. can and be able to in nineteenth-century Irish English 105
  12. Part 2. Patterns in the noun phrase
  13. Syntactic constraints on the use of dual form intensifiers in Modern English 131
  14. Ma daddy wis dead chuffed 151
  15. The case of focus 173
  16. Part 3. Patterns in complementation structures
  17. Null objects and sentential complements, with evidence from the Corpus of Historical American English 209
  18. A new angle on infinitival and of - ing complements of afraid , with evidence from the TIME Corpus 223
  19. Active and passive infinitive, ambiguity and non-canonical subject with ready 239
  20. Part 4. Patterns of clause combining
  21. The diffusion of English absolutes 265
  22. It-clefts in English L1 and L2 academic writing 295
  23. The speech functions of tag questions and their properties. A comparison of their distribution in COLT and LLC 321
  24. Author index 351
  25. Subject index 355
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