Diachronic and Synchronic Study on the Aspectual Restriction on the English Progressive

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25370555
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: English linguistics
• Research Institution: Kyushu Institute of Technology
• Principal Investigator: Goto Mariko 九州工業大学, 教養教育院, 教授 (20189773)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: Aspectual Restriction / Webster (1784) / Lowth (1762) / Murray (1798) / The Progressive / Stative / Pickbourn (1789) / Prescriptive Grammars

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study, which has explored the reason for the aspectual restriction on the progressive, has found that the construction in its spontaneity can be considered aspect-neutral. The research on corpora as well as on the Late Modern through Present-day English actual data including epistolary texts, trial records, novels reveals the fact that the progressive with a stative construal has been in actual use. Moreover, majority of Late Modern English grammars employ I am {loving/ fearing} as models of the periphrastic form. Noah Webster (1784: 25), for instance, explains that this form is used to confine the speaker’s scope of predication to the actual phenomenal situation denoted by the stem verb of the participle. This insight in fact leads to identifying one basic core meaning of the progressive, which Kranich (2010: 72) has expressed skepticism about achieving, but also in explaining diverse facets of the progressive construction.

Free Research Field

英語学、英語史、歴史言語学、認知言語学