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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. 190–229

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Searching for the progressive in treebanks

 | University of Bergen
Published online: 12 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.236.07de
Abstract
Research on the progressive aspect in Germanic and Romance languages has benefited from corpus data. A transparent, objective, reliable and replicable identification of such constructions in corpora is however challenging. The present chapter presents preliminary methodological work in automatically retrieving and counting authentic examples from treebanks, that is, grammatically annotated corpora. It demonstrates how selected constructions that mark the progressive in Italian and Norwegian are collected from treebanks accessible through the INESS platform. Deep syntactic relations such as those between predicates and arguments are factored in and quantified. Corpus queries that exploit syntactic dominance relations are potentially more powerful than queries using only linear precedence, but there is a relative shortage of treebank resources.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Italian
    • 2.1Data sourcing in previous work on Italian
    • 2.2Retrieval of Italian progressives from UD treebanks
  • 3.Norwegian
    • 3.1Overview of Norwegian progressives and previous work
    • 3.2NorGramBank
    • 3.3Semi-fixed constructions with med and the infinitive
    • 3.4Pseudo-coordinations
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (44)
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