Does Present-day English code what Modern English implied? Tracing the expression of progressive meaning through translation evidence

Abstract

The rise of the BE V ing progressive has been argued to reflect a broader shift in the typological profile of English from a bounded to an unbounded language, leading to changing preferences in aspectual construal and narrative organization. However, it remains unclear whether BE V ing directly replaced a dominant pattern of bounded event construal or superseded alternative strategies that were already available to express progressive(-like) meaning before. The idea of a typological shift suggests that many more strategies may have been involved. This article investigates diachronic change in the expression of progressive(-like) meaning. To this end, use is made of a historical parallel translation corpus consisting of eight successive English translations of Cervantes’ Don Quijote , giving insight into how the same meanings were expressed over time. The results suggest that the expression of progressive(-like) meaning in English went through a pragmatic stage, in which progressive meaning was mainly expressed through invited inference, followed by an experimentation stage, during which speakers of English resorted to a variety of lexical and (semi-)grammatical options to express these meanings semantically, and resulting in the current situation with the emergence of the grammaticalized marker BE V ing as an uncontested default coding option.