Early progressive passives
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Linda van Bergen
Abstract
The article presents a study of early progressive passives in English. It is based on a collection of data from large databases, and extends the data set of pre-1820 examples of the progressive passive very significantly. There is some indication in the data that the progressive passive may initially have been regional, as has been suggested in earlier work on early progressive passives, although if so, it was probably slightly further north than thought, but the data also indicate that the construction took root in London at quite an early stage. Contrary to previous claims, the evidence which we have at the moment does not appear to provide any particular reason for thinking that early use was mostly found in informal contexts such as private letters and was generally avoided in print. In addition, the new data cast doubt on the idea that the Southey-Coleridge circle played a major role in spreading the construction.
© 2013 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Attribution in Romance: Reconstructing the oral and written tradition
- The sound change *s- > n- in Arapaho
- Language vs. grammatical tradition in Ancient India: How real was Pāṇinian Sanskrit?
- The early Middle English reflexes of Germanic *ik ‘I’: Unpacking the changes
- Copularisation processes in French: Constructional intertwining, lexical attraction, and other dangerous things
- The Northern Subject Rule in first-person singular contexts in fourteenth-fifteenth-century Scots
- Early progressive passives
- Participant continuity and narrative structure: Defining discourse marker functions in Old English
- Book Reviews
