The dilemma of the English Progressive: Evaluating its historical sources in a universal context

Despite more than a millennium of written documentation of the English language, historical linguists and philologists have been generally unsuccessful in reconstructing the source of the Modern English Progressive. The problem comes down to the fact that there are two putative historical sources, one being an OE construction of analogous syntactic form to the Modern English Progressive and the other a locative construction of Middle English origin. Certain changes affecting the form of the OE and the ME constructions made them identical to one another and to the Modern English Progressive, thus confusing the historical data.; Theories about the development of the Modern English Progressive include those that would have it descend directly from the OE construction to those that assume the Progressive is some sort of merger of the two putative historical sources, although exactly what such a merger would entail is not often made clear. Few, however, have taken the position of this study that the Modern English Progressive developed out of the ME Locative Construction, a hypothesis for which I provide evidence in this dissertation.; Against a backdrop of studies in grammaticization and language universals, I argue against a direct relationship between the Modern English Progressive and the OE Construction and show how the same studies generally support the development from the ME Locative Construction. I also offer a fine-grained analysis of the use of the relevant constructions in Middle and Early Modern English periods to support my claims about the relationship between the Locative Construction and the Progressive, thus combining language universals and language internal data to seek an answer to the question of the origins of the Modern English Progressive.; The chief difference between this study and other approaches is my concentration on semantic development and the in-depth study of genre and authorship in my English-internal analysis. While my findings generally support a Middle English Locative provenance for the Modern English Progressive, I am also able to provide an argument for a literary interaction of the two historical sources, which suggests, at least for the Early Modern English period, a different development of the Progressive in the spoken versus the written language.