The Progressive Aspect in World Englishes: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of a study comparing the distribution and frequency of the forms, meanings and uses of the progressive aspect across a set of spoken and written categories in nine parallel corpora, representing four inner circle and five outer circle Englishes. Significant regional and stylistic variations were noted. Australian and New Zealand English emerge as the most innovative regional varieties in their use of the progressive, as determined by both sheer frequency and a wide range of other variables, followed by the Southeast Asian varieties, then the influential American and British varieties, with Kenyan and Indian English the least innovative. The progressive was found to be twice as frequent in speech as in writing, an asymmetry no doubt relevant to the attested rise of the progressive in Modern English. Meanwhile the role that the simple present progressive form and the futurate use are claimed to have had in the growth of the progressive is reflected in their particular affinity for spoken English.

Keywords:

• Progressive
• Aspect
• World English(es)
• Corpus

* I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the first version of this paper.

* I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the first version of this paper.

Notes

* I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the first version of this paper.

²The terms ‘inner circle’ and ‘outer circle’ are due to Kachru (1985).

³The source of each example is indicated as follows: the name of the corpus (see Section 4 for more details), followed by the text category/number, followed by the line number.

⁴The statistical procedure employed in this study was the chi-square test. The ‘R’ statistical program enabled a post-hoc analysis for this test.

⁵As observed by an anonymous reviewer, alternative subdivisions are conceivable (for instance putting BrE together with the Southern Hemisphere varieties, which are derived from it, as against AmE, given that we can distinguish an essentially British-derived from an American-derived branch of World Englishes).

⁶Biber et al. (1999) do not supply exact frequencies, but approximate numbers can be inferred from their bar graphs.

⁷The evidence is admittedly not strong: differences in the proportions of complex forms across the four regional groups are not statistically significant (χ² (3) = 3.3756, p > 0.05).

⁸The reason why Smith's figures and percentages don't add up is that he double-counted ambivalent examples.

⁹It could be objected that three of the nine variables used for the scoring are unlikely to be directly relevant to the progression of the progressive: namely, mental and communication verbs, negated progressives, and temporal specification. Omitting them from the calculations does not alter the ordering of the four regional groups: Sth Hem 18 > SE Asia 16 > Nth Hem 15 > Afr/Ind 11. There are however some repositionings in the comparison of the nine individual Englishes (AusE 43 > PhilE 40 > NZE/AmE 32 > SingE 31 > BrE 25 > KenE 24 > HKE 22 > IndE 21). Nevertheless the strong position of the Sth Hem group and the weak position of the Afr/Ind group are still in evidence, the Nth Hem varieties still occupy middle ground, and the SEA varieties are spread along the spectrum.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Collins1

Peter Collins, Linguistics Department, University of NSW, Sydney 2052, Victoria, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]