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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. 327–353

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Subjectification, subject pronouns and the progressive in Italian

 | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Published online: 12 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.236.11vio
Abstract
This study addresses the lack of focused research on how subjectivity is formally expressed in progressive constructions. Specifically, it explores correlations between subject pronouns (io ‘I’, lui/lei ‘he/she/it’, tu ‘you’) and the use of the progressive to convey subjectivity. Using both quantitative (statistics, sentiment analysis, emotion recognition) and qualitative (Systemic Functional Grammar) methods, the analysis examines 8,601 Tweets (162,269 tokens) from the xLiMe Twitter Corpus (Rei, Mladenić & Krek 2016). Results show that while the progressive is generally linked to negative sentiment, it is more strongly associated with emotions of joy and sadness. Additionally, the study finds that the use of subject pronouns significantly influences the likelihood of progressive constructions and the distribution of emotions, challenging previous findings.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Subjectivity and subject pronouns
  • 3.Methodology and data
  • 4.Analysis and results
    • 4.1Quantitative analysis
    • 4.2Summary of the quantitative findings
    • 4.3Qualitative analysis — SFL
    • 4.4Discussion
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (51)
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