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In:The Progressive Revisited: Historical and Quantitative Studies in Germanic and Romance Languages
Edited by Alessandro Carlucci and Jerzy Nykiel
[Studies in Language Companion Series 236] 2025
► pp. 47–74

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The rise of the progressive passive and the loss of the non-finite participial progressive being Ving

 | University of Cambridge
Published online: 12 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.236.02nor
Abstract
Denison (1993, 2000) hypothesizes that being Ving was productive as a non-finite gerund-participial pattern in Early Modern English (EModE) but receded because of the grammaticalization of the progressive passive. Very few studies have followed up on this proposed link and those which do find few examples of the ‘double-ing’ form in their corpus data (Hundt 2004b; Kranich 2010) and therefore downplay the importance of the supposed relationship between the appearance of the one form and disappearance of the other. This chapter examines the emergence of the progressive passive and the loss of the being Ving form in a corpus where these variables have not been studied before, namely the Historical Collection of the Text Creation Partnerships.
Article outline
  • 1.Setting the scene
  • 2.The progressive passive and the participial progressive
  • 3.Literature review
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Corpus
    • 4.2Search queries and study limitations
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1The progressive passive
    • 5.2The participial progressive
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (31)
References
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