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. 1–20
Introduction
Published online: 12 September 2025
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.236.intro
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.236.intro
Article outline
- 1.Grammatical aspect and progressive aspect
- 2.Typological and comparative perspectives
- 3.How progressive structures develop
- 4.Open questions
- 5.Overview and summary of the contributions in this volume
Notes References
References (83)
Anthonissen, Lynn, De Wit, Astrid & Mortelmans, Tanja. 2019. (Inter)subjective
uses of the Dutch progressive
constructions. Linguistics 57(5): 1111–1159.
Baglioni, Daniele & Rigobianco, Luca. 2024. Rethinking
fragmentariness and reconstruction: An
introduction. In Fragments of Languages: From ‘Restsprachen’
to Contemporary Endangered Languages, Daniele Baglioni & Luca Rigobianco (eds), 1–25. Leiden: Brill.
Bentein, Klaas. 2013. Prog
imperfective drift in Ancient Greek? Reconsidering eimi ‘be’ with present
participle. Transactions of the Philological
Society 111(1): 67–107.
Bertinetto, Pier Marco. 1986. Tempo, aspetto e azione nel
verbo italiano. Il sistema
dell’indicativo. Florence: Accademia della Crusca.
. 1995. Vers une typologie
du progressif dans les langues d’Europe. Modèles
Linguistiques 16: 37–61.
. 2000. The progressive in
Romance, as compared with English. In Tense and Aspect in the
Languages of Europe, Östen Dahl (ed.), 559–604. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter.
Bertinetto, Pier Marco & Delfitto, Denis. 2000. Aspect
vs. actionality: Why they should be kept apart. In Tense and
Aspect in the Languages of Europe, Östen Dahl (ed.), 189–225. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter.
Bertinetto, Pier Marco, Ebert, Karen H. & de Groot, Casper. 2000. The
progressive in Europe. In Tense and Aspect in the Languages
of Europe, Östen Dahl (ed.), 517–558. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter.
Bertinetto, Pier Marco & Squartini, Mario. 2016. Tense
and aspect. In The Oxford Guide to the Romance
Languages, Adam Ledgeway & Martin Maiden (eds), 939–953. Oxford: OUP.
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman
Grammar of Spoken and Written
English. Harlow: Pearson.
Bybee, Joan & Dahl, Östen. 1989. The
creation of the tense and aspect systems in the languages of the world. Studies in
Language 13: 51–103.
Bybee, Joan L., Perkins, Revere & Pagliuca, William. 1994. The
Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the
World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect:
An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related
Problems. Cambridge: CUP.
. 1995. Tense
and aspect. In Syntax: An International Handbook of
Contemporary Research, volume 2, Joachim Jacobs, Arnim von Stechow, Wolfgang Sternefeld & Theo Vennemann (eds), 1244–1252. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
. 2020. Introduction. In Perfects
in Indo-European Languages and Beyond, Robert Crellin & Thomas Jügel (eds), 1–13. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2016. Architettura
dell’italiano di oggi e linee di tendenza. In Manuale di
linguistica italiana, Sergio Lubello (ed.), 165–189. Berlin: De Gruyter.
De Miguel, Elena. 1999. El
aspecto léxico. In Gramática descriptiva de la lengua
española, Ignacio Bosque & Violeta Demonte (eds), vol 2, 2977–3060. Madrid: Espasa.
. 2000. Combining
English auxiliaries. In Pathways of Change:
Grammaticalization in English, Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach & Dieter Stein (eds), 111–148. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Dessì Schmid, Sarah 2019. Aspectuality:
An Onomasiological Model Applied to the Romance
Languages. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Dessì Schmid, Sarah & Momma, Lydia. 2024. Progressivity
between lexicon, grammar and context. In Tense, Aspect and
Discourse Structure, Jakob Egetenmeyer, Sarah Dessì Schmid & Martin G. Becker (eds), 67–90. Berlin: De Gruyter.
De Wit, Astrid & Patard, Adeline. 2013. Modality,
aspect and the progressive: The semantics of the present progressive in French in comparison with
English. Languages in
Contrast 13(1): 113–132.
De Wit, Astrid, Petré, Peter & Brisard, Frank. 2020. Standing
out with the progressive. Journal of
Linguistics 56(3): 479–514.
Drinka, Bridget. 2017. Language
Contact in Europe: The Periphrastic Perfect through
History. Cambridge: CUP.
Ebert, Karen H. 2000. Progressive markers in
Germanic languages. In Tense and Aspect in the Languages of
Europe, Östen Dahl (ed.), 605–653. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter.
Eide, Kristin Melum & Fryd, Marc. 2021. The
perfect volume: papers on the perfect. In The Perfect Volume:
Papers on the Perfect, Kristin Melum Eide & Marc Fryd (eds), 1–40. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Fanego, Teresa. 2024. English
motion and progressive constructions, and the typological drift from bounded to unbounded discourse
construal. Language
Sciences 101: 1–19.
Filip, Hana. 2021. Lexical
aspect (Aktionsart). In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to
Semantics, Daniel Gutzmann, Lisa Matthewson, Cécile Meier, Hotze Rullmann & Thomas Ede Zimmermann (eds), Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Filppula, Markku. 2003. The
quest for the most “parsimonious” explanations: Endogeny vs. contact
revisited. In Motives for Language
Change, Raymond Hickey (ed.), 161–173. Cambridge: CUP.
Filppula, Markku & Klemola, Juhani. 2014. Celtic
influences in English: A re-evaluation. Neuphilologische
Mitteilungen 115(1): 33–53.
Halliday, Michael & Matthiessen, Christian. 2004. An
Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd
ed.). London: Routledge.
Hansen, Björn. 2017. What
happens after grammaticalization? Post-grammaticalization processes in the area of
modality. In Aspects of Grammaticalization:
(Inter)subjectification and Directionality, Daniel van Olmen, Hubert Cuyckens & Lobke Ghesquière (eds), 257–280. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Hengeveld, Kees. 2011. The
grammaticalization of tense and aspect. In The Oxford
Handbook of Grammaticalization, Heiko Narrog & Bernd Heine (eds), 580–594. Oxford: OUP.
Jóhannsdóttir, Kristín M. 2011. Aspects of the
Progressive in English and Icelandic. PhD
dissertation, University of British Columbia. [URL]
Killie, Kristin. 2004. Subjectivity
and the English progressive. English Language and
Linguistics 8(1): 25–46.
. 2008. From
locative to durative to focalized? The English progressive and “PROG imperfective
drift”. In English Historical Linguistics 2006: Selected
Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21–25
August 2006. Volume I: Syntax and Morphology, Maurizio Gotti, Marina Dossena & Richard Dury (eds), 69–88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kinn, Torodd. 2018. Pseudocoordination
in Norwegian. Degrees of grammaticalization and constructional
variants. In Grammaticalization Meets Construction
Grammar, Evie Coussé, Peter Andersson & Joel Olofsson (eds), 75–106. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2023. Meaning
integration in pseudocoordination. In Constructional
Approaches to Nordic Languages, Evie Coussé, Steffen Höder, Benjamin Lyngfelt & Julia Prentice (eds), 114–144. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kinn, Torodd, Blensenius, Kristian & Andersson, Peter. 2018. Posture,
location, and activity in Mainland Scandinavian
pseudocoordinations. CogniTextes 18, online.
Koops, Christian. 2004. Emergent
aspect constructions in Present-Day-English. In Studies in
Linguistic Motivation, Günther Radden & Klaus-Uwe Panther (eds), 121–154. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kranich, Svenja. 2007. Subjectification
and the English progressive: The history of ALWAYS + progressive constructions. York
Papers in
Linguistics 2(8): 120–137.
. 2010. The
Progressive in Modern English: A Corpus-based Study of Grammaticalization and Related
Changes. Amsterdam & New York: Radopi.
Kruisinga, Etsko. 1931. A
Handbook of Present-day English. Part II: English Accidence and
Syntax, vol. 1. Groningen: P. Noordhoff.
Kuteva, Tania, Heine, Bernd, Hong, Bo, Long, Haiping, Narrog, Heiko & Rhee, Seongha. 2019. World
Lexicon of
Grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2007. Constructing the
meanings of personal pronouns. In Aspects of Meaning
Construction, Günter Radden, Klaus-Michael Köpcke, Thomas Berg & Peter Siemund (eds), 171–187. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ledgeway, Adam & Vincent, Nigel. 2022. Periphrasis
and inflexion: Lessons from Romance. In Periphrasis and
Inflexion in Diachrony: A View from Romance, Adam Ledgeway, John Charles Smith & Nigel Vincent (eds), 11–60. Oxford: OUP.
Leech, Geoffrey N., Hundt, Marianne, Mair, Christian & Smith, Nicholas. 2009. Change
in Contemporary English: A Grammatical
Study. Cambridge: CUP.
Levin, Magnus. 2013. The
progressive verb in modern American English. In The Verb
Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora, Bas Aarts, Geoffrey Leech, Joanne Close & Sean Wallis (eds), 187–216. Cambridge: CUP.
Mallory, James & Adams, Douglas Q. 2006. The Oxford Introduction
to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European
World. Oxford: OUP.
Petré, Peter. 2016. Grammaticalization
by changing co-text frequencies, or why [BE Ving] became the
“progressive”. English Language and
Linguistics 20(1): 31–54.
Pfaff, Meike, Bergs, Alexander & Hoffmann, Thomas. 2013. I
was just reading this article — on the expression of recentness and the English past
progressive. In The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating
Recent Language Change with Corpora, Bas Aarts, Geoffrey Leech, Joanne Close & Sean Wallis (eds), 217–238. Cambridge: CUP.
Pountain, Christopher J. 2000. Capitalization. In Historical
Linguistics 1995, Volume 1: General Issues and non-Germanic Languages, John Charles Smith & Delia Bentley (eds), 295–309. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rei, Luis, Mladenić, Dunja & Krek, Simon. 2016. A
multilingual social media linguistic corpus. In Proceedings
of the 4th Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the
Humanities. Ljubljana: University of Ljubljana.
Rohe, Udo. 2019. The
Progressive in Present-Day Spoken English: Real-Time Studies of Its Spread and Functional
Diversification. PhD
dissertation, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität. [URL]
Smith, Nicholas. 2005. A
Corpus-Based Investigation of Recent Change in the Use of the Progressive in British
English. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Lancaster
University.
Smitterberg, Erik. 2005. The
Progressive in 19th-century English: A Process of
Integration. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Teleman, Ulf, Hellberg, Staffan & Andersson, Erik. 1999. Svenska
Akademiens Grammatik. Stockholm: Svenska Akademien.
Thomason, Sarah G. 2004. Contact as a source of
language change. In The Handbook of Historical
Linguistics, Brian D. Joseph & Richard D. Janda (eds), 686–712. Oxford: Blackwell.
2020. Contact explanations in
linguistics. In The Handbook of Language
Contact (2nd ed.), Raymond Hickey (ed.), 33–49. Oxford: Blackwell.
Torres Cacoullos, Rena. 2000. Grammaticization,
Synchronic Variation, and Language Contact: A Study of Spanish Progressive -ndo
Constructions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1989. On the rise of
epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic
change. Language 65(1): 31–55.
van der Auwera, Johan & Plungian, Vladimir A. 1998. Modality’s
semantic map. Linguistic
Typology 2(1): 79–124.
Viola, Lorella. 2023. On
the use of sentiment analysis for linguistics research: Observations on sentiment polarity and the use of the
progressive in Italian. Frontiers in Artificial
Intelligence 6.
Wiklund, Anna-Lena. 1996. Pseudocoordination
is subordination. Paper presented at the XVIth
Scandinavian Conference of
Linguistics, Turku.
