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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. 75–97

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Grinding to a halt?

The spread of the progressive in recent spoken British English

 | University of Eastern Finland
Published online: 12 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.236.03rau
Abstract
This study investigates the progressive form in spoken British English in the 1990s and 2010s, focusing on the frequency of the construction and the lemmata co-occurring with it. The results indicate that the progressive is no longer increasing in frequency. A distinctive collexeme analysis indicates that the frequency of dynamic verbs (e.g. going) has decreased in the timespan investigated, while mental (e.g. thinking) and communication verbs (e.g. saying) show increasing frequencies. The increasing number of fixed patterns involving the progressive form, such as be just saying, may indicate that the progressive is acquiring more robust pragmatic, i.e. non-aspectual, uses in recent spoken British English, despite the overall decrease in progressive frequency.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The spread of the progressive
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Extraction and annotation of data
    • 3.2Distinctive collexeme analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Frequency of the progressive in recent BrE
      • 4.1.1Individual lexical verbs
      • 4.1.2Catalysts of change revisited
    • 4.2Collostructional patterns
    • 4.3Fixed patterns with the progressive
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (30)
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