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Progressives, Patterns, Pedagogy: A corpus-driven approach to English progressive forms, functions, contexts and didactics (Studies in Corpus Linguistics)
Ute Römer
Categories: Education
Seiten: 327 / 343
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Ian Hutchby
Progressives, Patterns, Pedagogy
Studies in Corpus Linguistics
SCL focuses on the application of corpus method throughout language study,
the development of a computational approach to linguistics, and the
development of new tools for processing language.
General Editor
Elena Tognini-Bonelli
Consulting Editor
Wolfgang Teubert
Michael Barlow
Graeme Kennedy
Robert de Beaugrande
Geoffrey Leech
Federal University of Minas Gerais
Douglas Biber
Anna Mauranen
North Arizona University
University of Wales, Swansea
Sylviane Granger
Piet van Sterkenburg
Institute for Dutch Lexicology, Leiden
M. A. K. Halliday
Michael Stubbs
Susan Hunston
Jan Svartvik
University of Lund
Stig Johansson
H-Z. Yang
Oslo University
Progressives, Patterns, Pedagogy: A corpus-driven approach
to English progressive forms, functions, contexts and didactics
by Ute Römer
A corpus-driven approach
to English progressive forms, functions,
contexts and didactics
University of Hanover
Amsterdam/Philadelphia
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Cover illustration from original painting Random Order
by Lorenzo Pezzatini, Florence, 1996.
Progressives, Patterns, Pedagogy : A corpus-driven approach to English
progressive forms, functions, contexts and didactics / Ute Römer.
p. cm. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics, issn 1388–0373 ; v. 18)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
1. English language--Tense. 2. English language--Verb phrase. 3.
English language--Discourse analysis. 4. English language--Great Britain-Discourse analysis. 5. English language--Study and teaching--German
speakers. I. Title. II. Series.
PE1301.R66 2005
425'.62--dc22
isbn 90 272 2289 4 (Hb; alk. paper)
© 2005 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
To Wolf-Dietrich Bald (1942–2004)
Introduction: A need to take stock of progressives
1.1 Scope and aims of the study 1
1.2 Method of analysis 3
1.3 Structure of the book 4
The theoretical basis of the study: Corpora, contexts, didactics
2.1 Corpus-driven linguistics (CDL) 7
2.1.1 CDL – a new theory emerging from corpus work 7
2.1.2 Corpus-based vs. corpus-driven approaches 8
2.2 Contextual approaches to the study of language 11
2.2.1 John R. Firth 12
2.2.2 John McH. Sinclair 13
2.3 Pedagogic and didactic grammar 14
2.3.1 Definitions 14
2.3.2 The Mindtian approach – empirical grammars 16
2.3.3 The present approach 17
Progressives in theoretical studies and grammars of English
3.1 Problems of definition and terminology 19
3.2 The diachronic dimension: Progressives on the rise 21
3.3 The English progressive in two influential theoretical studies 22
3.3.1 Comrie 1976 22
3.3.2 Williams 2002 24
3.4 The progressive in recent linguistic and empirical grammars 25
3.4.1 Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, Svartvik 1985 25
3.4.2 Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, Finegan 1999 27
3.4.3 Mindt 2000 28
3.4.4 Huddleston, Pullum 2002 29
 Table of contents
3.5 Previous empirical findings on the use of the progressive 31
3.5.1 Frequencies 32
3.5.2 Functions 33
3.5.3 Contexts 34
Progressives in spoken British English
4.1 Corpus selection 37
4.1.1 Why spoken British native-speaker English (BrNSE)? 38
4.1.2 Availability of spoken British native-speaker English corpora 40
4.1.3 Corpus size and representativeness 41
4.1.4 Corpora used in this study 42
4.2 The empirical method: BNC and BoE data collection, processing,
and evaluation 47
4.2.1 Verbs under analysis 47
4.2.2 The collection of corpus data: Query strategies 48
4.2.3 Data filtering 54
4.2.4 Data processing and encoding: The construction of an Access
4.2.5 Data evaluation 58
4.3 The use of progressives in spoken English (I) – contexts 60
4.3.1 Distribution of different tense forms 61
4.3.2 Tense form contractions 66
4.3.3 Progressives and subjects 68
4.3.4 Progressives and objects 70
4.3.5 Progressives and prepositions 71
4.3.6 Progressives and negation 72
4.3.7 Progressives and other lexical-grammatical phenomena 74
4.3.8 Adverbial specification 75
4.3.9 Summary of the findings [spoken English – contexts] 79
4.4 The use of progressives in spoken English (II) – functions 80
4.4.1 Time reference 81
4.4.2 Two central function features: Continuousness and repeatedness 86
4.4.3 One central function or several central functions? 90
4.4.4 Central functions and time reference 93
4.4.5 Additional functions of the progressive 95
4.4.6 Additional functions and time reference 106
4.4.7 Summary of the findings [spoken English – functions] 110
4.5 Verbs and progressives – How lexical is grammar? 111
4.5.1 Distribution and restrictions: 100 verbs and 9,468 concordance
lines [BNC/BoE] 113
4.5.2 Verbs and tense form distributions [BNC/BoE] 117
Verbs and subjects [BNC/BoE] 123
Verbs and objects [BNC/BoE] 130
Verbs and prepositions [BNC/BoE] 136
Verbs and negation [BNC/BoE] 136
Verbs and other lexical-grammatical phenomena [BNC/BoE] 143
Verbs and adverbial specification [BNC/BoE] 146
Verbs and time reference [BNC/BoE] 151
Verbs and central functions of the progressive [BNC/BoE] 157
Verbs and additional functions of the progressive [BNC/BoE] 161
Summary of the findings [spoken English –
verbs and progressives] 169
Progressive teaching (?): Progressives in the German EFL classroom
5.1 Learning problem "progressive" 172
5.2 Selection of teaching materials 174
5.3 The German English as a Foreign Language Textbook Corpus
(GEFL TC) – a collection of EFL textbook language 175
5.3.1 Corpus design and composition 175
5.3.2 Corpus compilation 177
5.4 The empirical method: GEFL TC data collection, processing,
and evaluation 178
5.4.1 Verbs under analysis 178
5.4.2 Data collection: Querying GEFL TC with WordSmith Tools 179
5.4.3 Data filtering 180
5.4.4 Data processing and encoding: The addition of GEFL TC
concordance lines to the Access database 180
5.4.5 Data evaluation 180
5.5 The use of progressives in "school" English (I) – contexts 181
5.5.1 Distribution of different tense forms 182
5.5.2 Tense form contractions 184
5.5.3 Progressives and subjects 187
5.5.4 Progressives and objects 188
5.5.5 Progressives and prepositions 189
5.5.6 Progressives and negation 190
5.5.7 Progressives and other lexical-grammatical phenomena 191
5.5.8 Adverbial specification 192
5.5.9 Summary of the findings [GEFL TC – contexts] 195
5.6 The use of progressives in "school" English (II) – functions 196
5.6.1 Time reference 196
5.6.2 Two central function features:
Continuousness and repeatedness 199


5.6.3 Central functions 201
5.6.4 Additional functions of the progressive 203
5.6.5 Summary of the findings [GEFL TC – functions] 205
5.7 Verbs and progressives in GEFL TC – How lexical is EFL
textbook grammar? 205
5.7.1 The distribution of progressive verb forms in GEFL TC 206
5.7.2 Verbs and tense form distributions [GEFL TC] 207
5.7.3 Verbs and subjects [GEFL TC] 210
5.7.4 Verbs and objects [GEFL TC] 212
5.7.5 Verbs and prepositions [GEFL TC] 214
5.7.6 Verbs and negation [GEFL TC] 216
5.7.7 Verbs and other lexical-grammatical phenomena [GEFL TC] 218
5.7.8 Verbs and adverbial specification [GEFL TC] 218
5.7.9 Verbs and time reference [GEFL TC] 222
5.7.10 Verbs and central functions of the progressive [GEFL TC] 225
5.7.11 Verbs and additional functions of the progressive [GEFL TC] 227
5.7.12 Summary of the findings [GEFL TC – verbs and progressives] 229
5.8 Progressive progression (?) – When and how are progressives
introduced in the textbooks? 230
5.8.1 The progression in Learning English Green Line New
(volumes 1–6) 231
5.8.2 The progression in English G 2000 A (volumes 1–6) 234
5.8.3 Summary and discussion 237
Progressives in real spoken English and in "school" English: A comparison
6.1 Progressives and context phenomena 244
6.1.7 Progressives and adverbial specification 253
6.2 Progressives and function phenomena 256
6.2.1 Progressives and time reference 257
6.2.2 Progressives and central functions 260
6.2.3 Progressives and additional functions 266
6.3 Summary of the findings: Progressives in use vs. progressives
in the books 268
Pedagogical implications: True facts, textbooks, teaching
7.1 Corpus-driven linguistics and language teaching 276
7.2 The case for more authenticity in the classroom 277
7.3 Improving communicative competence: Teach the typical 280
7.4 Teaching progressives in natural contexts 282
7.5 Focussing on frequent functions of progressives 283
7.6 Shifting emphasis to lexis 285
7.7 Towards a corpus-driven communicative didactic lexical grammar
of progressives 287
Conclusions: Corpus, practice, theory
8.1 From corpus to practice 294
8.2 From corpus to theory 297

I am very much indebted to my academic teacher and supervisor Wolf-Dietrich Bald,
who was always supportive of my work, enthusiastic about my ideas, and a constant
source of motivation. I would have wished he could have seen this study completed.
To him the book is dedicated. Many thanks are also due to Rainer Schulze and Bernhard Kettemann for their advice, support, and encouragement, especially when things
got tough.
I am grateful to the University of Cologne, the German Academic Exchange
Service (DAAD), the European Commission, and the German Research Foundation
(DFG) for providing me with scholarships and travel grants, and to HarperCollins
publishers and The University of Birmingham for permission to access The Bank of
English. Special thanks must go to David Oakey for countless helpful comments and
suggestions on the whole manuscript and to John Sinclair for his invaluable feedback
on parts of the book.
I would also like to thank the conference delegates at IVACS 2002 in Limerick,
TaLC 2002 in Bertinoro, ICAME 2003 in Guernsey, ICAME 2004 in Verona, and TaLC
2004 in Granada for their helpful comments, stimulating questions, and supportive
feedback after my presentations. The same applies to the participants at the Tuscan
Word Centre courses in April 2000 and October 2001. Particular thanks go to the organisers of these expert training courses, Elena Tognini-Bonelli and John Sinclair, and
to the 'guru' of the April 2000 course, Stig Johansson, for helping me find my way and
for keeping me on track. It is a privilege to be introduced to corpus linguistics by some
of the most original and open-minded thinkers in the field.
The following colleagues and friends deserve a big thankyou for their encouragement and support, for their interest in my work, and for countless "keep going" emails:
Michael Barlow, Linda Bawcom, Ylva Berglund, Pernilla Danielsson, Anna Mauranen,
Nadja Nesselhauf, David Oakey, Hanna Pishwa, Norbert Schlüter, Colin Wilcockson,
and Chris Williams. On a similar note, my thanks go to a number of friends and colleagues in the English Department at the University of Cologne, not only from the
linguistics but also from the literature side.
Last, but certainly not least, I wish to thank my parents Anita and Peter, my sister
Anja, and my partner Karsten for their constant support, their endless patience, and
for always being there.
A need to take stock of progressives
. Scope and aims of the study
The English progressive, i.e. the combination of a form of the verb TO BE and the
present participle (-ing form) of a verb (e.g. is changing, were working), has been variously described as an area of terminological inconsistencies, definitional and descriptive problems, and semantic or functional confusion (cf. Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca
1994; Declerck 1991; Hatav 1993; Landman 1992; Ljung 1980; Nehls 1974; Palmer
1988; Recktenwald 1975; Scheffer 1975; Williams 2002). Numerous theoretical studies have dealt with forms and functions of the "continuous", "expanded", "durative",
or "periphrastic" form, as the progressive is sometimes called, and large parts of any
available grammar book are dedicated to a detailed description of progressive aspect.
These accounts may differ considerably from each other, and there is no real consensus
among scholars about the way in which progressive forms and functions are best dealt
with. As Williams (2002: 13) notes, issues related to the use of progressive and nonprogressive forms have been raised in a large number of publications, none of which,
however, provides "an exhaustive or wholly accurate account of what it is that makes a
speaker or writer choose" one form or the other.
What most of the existing studies on the progressive lack, I argue, is a broad empirical basis. More often than not, theoretical statements are derived on the basis of a
limited collection of example sentences which are not attested instances of language
use but rather intuitive examples which have been invented for the purpose of illustrating a particular point, or which have been taken from earlier linguistic studies and
grammar books. Quantitative data on the distribution of different progressive forms
or functions, or on co-occurrences with context features such as temporal adverbials,
are also often missing from these studies. I think that a systematic empirical analysis,
based on large amounts of language data, would be a sounder basis to theorise from.
Also, it could perhaps help to sort out some of the still existing descriptive problems
and contribute to clearing up part of the confusion on the function side.
One of the aims of the present study is hence to give a detailed synchronic empirical account of progressive verb forms in contemporary spoken British English. The
study will address the following rather basic questions: How are progressives actually
used in spoken English? How are their different forms distributed? In which lexical or
syntactical contexts do they usually occur? What do different progressive forms typi-

cally express? and Is it possible to identify a "generally valid" behaviour of progressives,
or do different verbs show largely dissimilar context and function patterns? To tackle
these questions, I analyse large amounts of language data – data which occurred in
natural communicative situations and which were then stored on the computer, forming what is well-known under the term "corpus", i.e. an electronic collection of bits
and pieces of spoken and/or written language used for linguistic analysis. A detailed
empirical analysis of 10,171 progressive verb forms in context will form the basis for
the development of a new and challenging approach to English progressives.
In addition to my linguistic curiosity, my interest in the topic is of a pedagogical nature. It has been noted by grammarians and applied linguistic researchers that
in a foreign language teaching context, progressives, like other aspect-related phenomena, count among the grammatical "troublemakers" for learners and teachers of
English. Williams (2002: 18) notes that the progressive "constitutes one of the most
basic and ubiquitous problems facing language teachers", and several other researchers
highlight the difficulty that learners usually have in handling this grammar feature
(cf. e.g. Hahn et al. 2000; Mindt 1997a; Nehls 1988; or Westergren Axelsson & Hahn
2001). Especially learners of language backgrounds in which the progressive does not
exist as a grammatical category (e.g. German, Norwegian, Polish, or Swedish) have
constant problems with its appropriate use (cf. Johansson & Stavestrand 1987; LenkoSzymanska 2004).
In this context I consider it important to find out whether learners have problems
with the appropriate use of progressives because progressives as such are more difficult to use than other language items or because their use is inadequately described
in their coursebooks and reference grammars. In other words, the question is "What
came first, the language problem or the faulty description?" To answer this question
and to find out more about the presentation of progressives in teaching materials, a
systematic account of the language of coursebooks will be the next step in my analysis. The question that I am going to address is "How is the progressive presented in
a German EFL teaching context?" It is hoped that the study may thus contribute to a
clarification of some of the problems connected with teaching and learning how to use
progressive forms.
The next task is then to find out whether there are any significant differences between the use of progressives in real English and in so-called "school" English. This
means that the results of a corpus linguistic analysis of functions and contexts of the
progressive in natural English, as used in actual communicative situations, will be
compared with the results of an investigation of the same features in English as it is
used in the foreign language classroom. The present study can thus be seen as an example of the indirect use of corpora in language pedagogy, the merits of which have
been described in a number of works by some of the leading researchers in the field
of corpus linguistics (cf. Aston 2000; Aston, Bernardini, & Stewart 2004; Barlow 1996,
2003; Biber, Conrad, & Reppen 1994, 1998; Hunston 2002a; Kettemann & Marko 2002;
Partington 1998; Sinclair 2004a; Tognini-Bonelli 2001). Some of the most important
strengths of corpora in a pedagogical context are that (i) they cover the actual language
use of thousands of expert speakers, (ii) they give objective evidence since individual
speaker preferences are equalled out in a large collection of text, (iii) they provide us
with masses of natural language examples, and (iv) they highlight what is common
and typical in the language.
Using the potential offered by corpora and corpus-analytic means, I will put myself in a mediator position and try to at least partially bridge the still existing gap
between corpus linguistic research and language teaching. As a follow-up to the question about differences between authentic English and classroom English, it will be
asked whether changes of teaching materials, and if so what kind of changes, ought
to be made in order to achieve a higher degree of naturalness or authenticity in language teaching. The aim will be to develop a new concept of teaching the English
progressive – a concept which takes empirical findings into account.
As mentioned above, the study will deal with the verbal construction form of TO
BE + present participle, which is here referred to as "the progressive" of a verb. Progressives can in theory be formed of every English verb and of every tense form of the
verb.1 From all the theoretically possible forms, this study only deals with the present
progressive (e.g. are feeling), the past progressive (e.g. were feeling), the present
perfect progressive (e.g. have been feeling), and the past perfect progressive (e.g.
had been feeling). Incomplete or fragmentary instances of these four tense forms (e.g.
. . . how you feeling?) have also been included and labelled accordingly in the database.
Progressive infinitives (e.g. be feeling), modal progressives (e.g. will be feeling), and all
passives (e.g. has been being felt) have been excluded from the analysis. These constructions are rather infrequent and thus there is insufficient data from which to make
confident statements beneficial to learners.
. Method of analysis
What do you imagine that it means? I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to
theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories,
instead of theories to suit facts.
(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle 1892: 7)
As mentioned above, the central aims of this study are to carefully examine the ways in
which the progressive is used in spoken British English and to relate the findings of this
examination to a pedagogical context. The approach taken in order to achieve these
aims can be described as corpus-driven (for a detailed description of this approach see
Section 2.1), meaning that the analysis starts from corpus evidence and may lead to
new insights into the language. Instead of first formulating a theory and then illustrating its applicability to occurrences of language use, I will put the evidence before the
system and observe the data before I will derive the theoretical findings.2
When I studied chemistry, I learnt that the experiment usually comes first, even
if all kinds of speculations on the object of research may precede it. You have an idea


about an interesting phenomenon worth investigating, carry out an experiment, make
observations, describe carefully what you see, and then try to find a model which supports your findings, sometimes realising that the existing models are not entirely useful
as they do not fully mirror reality. My analytic method is comparable to the procedure
I have just described. I do not base my research on any particular pre-existing model
or theory of the progressive. This means that many of the functional categories found
in existing non-corpus-driven theoretical studies on the topic are not unreflectedly accepted as they may not account for everything that is likely to arise from the data. New
categories had to be found and existing ones had to be newly defined. I believe that if
empirical analyses are based on pre-existing categories and theories, corpus linguistics
cannot be much more than a methodology (cf. Leech's 1992: 105 definition) and thus
cannot lead to the formulation of a new theory about the language, but instead only to
confirmations or slight alterations of already established frameworks. What we need
to do, I argue (following researchers such as Sinclair, Teubert, and Tognini-Bonelli),
is reject any preconceptions and existing theories when we start our analyses, since
we may otherwise "run the risk [. . .] of distorting the data by creating a self-fulfilling
corroboration of underlying assumptions." (Teubert 1999: 7)
Critical readers (and/or natural scientists) might argue in this context that no
kind of observation can ever be theory-neutral (cf. Young 1971; as quoted in Stubbs
2000: 31: "all facts are theory-laden") and that starting an analysis from a particular
verb form already implies a certain theoretical basis. They are right. If you do not have
at least a rough idea of what you are looking at, you probably will not find much. I will
therefore stick to many of the traditionally accepted grammatical terms like "verb",
"preposition", "subject", "question", etc., categories that have proven useful in language
analysis, even if they are not entirely theory-neutral; few chemists would ever seriously
question the usefulness of the periodic table. I have tried, however, to keep the amount
of theory-reliance to a minimum in order not to hinder the process of discovering new
progressive-related phenomena so far not covered in the literature on the topic.3 In
Sinclair's (1994: 25) terms, I have tried to "only apply loose and flexible frameworks"
and to trust the data. Hence I knew what I was looking at (i.e. progressive forms of
English verbs) and to a certain extent also what I was looking for (i.e. typical functions
and contexts of progressives), but I did not know what I was going to find in the data
(i.e. which different functions the progressive can have and which contexts it usually
appears in). The method described here may appear radical (esp. when compared with
more traditional ways of linguistic analysis), but it helps to avoid circularity and can
lead to new findings about the language (cf. Tognini-Bonelli 2001: 11).
. Structure of the book
The present book consists of an introduction, six main chapters, and a conclusion. Following this introductory chapter, Chapter 2 specifies the theoretical basis of the study,
giving accounts of what is referred to as corpus-driven linguistics (CDL), as opposed
to corpus-based linguistics (CBL), introducing the reader to Firthian and Sinclairian
contextual approaches to language analysis, and describing the concepts of pedagogic
and didactic grammar.
Chapter 3 discusses how the topic "progressive aspect" is treated in the theoretical literature and in some recent important grammars of English. Included here is a
short description of existing definitional and terminological problems in this field of
linguistic analysis. A brief look at the historical development of the English progressive
will serve to support the importance of aspect-related research.
Chapter 4 leads us to the first part of the empirical analysis which is at the centre of the study. It will be investigated how progressive verb forms of the 100 most
frequent verbs are used in spoken British English. After a description of corpus selection criteria, the chapter will deal with methodological aspects, such as the collection,
processing, encoding, and evaluation of corpus data, before illustrating in some detail
which contexts and functions of progressives could be found in the chosen corpora, i.e.
in the 10 million word spoken part of the British National Corpus (BNC) and in the
20 million word British spoken English (brspok) subsection of The Bank of English
(BoE) respectively. To find out whether it is justified to talk about a "lexical grammar"4 of a language instead of sticking to the traditional, in a pedagogical context still
highly influential separation of language into grammar and lexis, the question will be
asked "How lexical is grammar?" What I want to find out is whether there is such
a thing as a purely grammatical progressive or whether it would be more sensible to
talk about a lexical-grammatical progressive. Starting from the analysed lexical items,
i.e. starting separately from each of the 100 selected verb forms, I search for relations
between individual verbs and certain syntactic and semantic phenomena, such as typical collocations, colligations, or combinations of verb forms with certain progressive
meaning features.
In Chapter 5 the attention is turned to the treatment of the progressive in foreign language teaching, exemplified by EFL teaching on German secondary school
level. The empirical analysis focussed on here runs parallel to the one described in
the previous chapter. While Chapter 4 deals with BNC and BoE data, the corpus used
in this second part of the empirical investigation is GEFL TC (the German English
as a Foreign Language Textbook Corpus), a small electronic collection of texts taken
from two best-selling EFL textbook series widely used in German secondary schools.
In addition to the discussion of contexts, functions, and lexical-grammatical features
of progressives, parts of Chapter 5 will also consider the grammatical progression in
the textbooks selected and deal with some differences between the two textbook series
Green Line New and English G 2000 A.
Chapter 6 compares the results of Chapters 4 and 5 and shows whether, and if so
in what ways, the presentation of the progressive in German EFL teaching materials
differs from the use of progressive verb forms in spoken British English.
Chapter 7 directly responds to the similarities and differences found between
"school" English and real English and deals with a new concept of teaching the English
progressive – a concept which goes back to the findings of this corpus-driven study.


Its seven subchapters serve to discuss a few pedagogical implications of the present research, some of which might present a challenge to applied linguists, textbook writers,
and EFL teachers alike. Finally, the chapter provides a first draft of a new concept of
teaching progressives.
Chapter 8 concludes the book, attempts to summarise major findings, and
stresses the importance of further comparative and corpus-driven research on lexicalgrammatical phenomena, and especially on such phenomena which cause constant
problems in language learning and teaching. The chapter looks at relations between
corpus work and corpus findings on the one hand, and practical applications (in our
case in language pedagogy) and theoretical linguistic considerations on the other, and
gives an outlook on related future research.
The theoretical basis of the study
Corpora, contexts, didactics
. Corpus-driven linguistics (CDL)
As featured in the title of this book and as mentioned above, the approach taken here
is a corpus-driven one. In Section 1.2 it has been said that the investigation is highly
committed to the data it starts from and that it tries to derive observational and theoretical findings from there, always trying not to lose contact with the corpora. This
is – in a nutshell – what corpus-driven linguistics (henceforth CDL) is about. The
following two paragraphs give an account of some central features of CDL, describe
differences between this approach and other corpus-based approaches, and show what
it is that makes CDL so powerful and thus in a way superior to other ways of analysing
.. CDL – a new theory emerging from corpus work
This headline may come as a surprise to the reader, especially as corpus linguistics is
usually referred to as a methodology or as one of the possible data-gathering options
a linguist can choose from when she or he needs evidence (alongside with informant
asking or relying on her or his intuition). Articles and introductory textbooks on corpus linguistics tend to tell us that what they describe is neither a separate branch
of linguistics, like morphology or syntax, nor one of the "hyphenated branches"
of linguistics, like socio-linguistics or text-linguistics (cf. Leech 1992: 105). Kennedy
(1998: 7), for instance, considers it
misleading [. . .] to suggest that corpus linguistics is a theory of language in competition with other theories of language such as transformational grammar, or
even more that it is a new or separate branch of linguistics.
How then, the reader might ask, can CDL as a discipline within corpus linguistics be
more than a methodology, a domain of study, a theory even?
It is certainly true that, as Leech (1992: 105) notes, "corpus linguistics combines
easily with other branches of linguistics".5 In doing so, however, corpus linguistics not
only adds a statistical dimension to our object of study, but often also confronts us
with rather surprising findings which existing frameworks fail to account for (cf. e.g.
Sinclair 1994: 25). As Mindt was able to show in connection with his studies on future

expressions in English (see e.g. Mindt 1985, 1987, 1991, and 1992), corpus linguistic
research often involves a necessity "to redefine linguistic classes, regroup cases or reclassify items." (Mindt 1991: 194) Corpus analysis may in fact, if taken seriously, make
it necessary to redefine or regroup traditional linguistic concepts. The work done and
the results obtained by researchers involved in the COBUILD project at the University
of Birmingham is a case in point here.6 These researchers's corpus-driven work has
shown that the traditional division of the language system into grammar and lexis
is rather inadequate in the light of natural data. Lexis and grammatical structures
are closely linked and depend on each other. As observed by Hunston and Francis
(2000: 251),
if we note that want is often followed by a to-infinitive clause, it is not possible to
decide whether this is a fact about lexis (the collocation of want and to) or a fact
about grammar (the distribution of to-infinitive clauses). (italics in original)
In this context the authors discovered that each of the language patterns they analysed
in their pattern grammar approach occurred "with a restricted set of lexical items,
and each lexical item occur[red] with a restricted set of patterns." (Hunston & Francis
2000: 3; see also Hunston 2002b). This makes it very questionable whether we still
ought to follow the tradition and distinguish grammar and lexis. Insights provided by
research in the corpus-driven tradition prove that corpus linguistics can under certain
circumstances in fact be more than a new empirical way of investigating a language
and that corpus linguistic analysis can lead to a new theory of that language. It can be
argued that the new developing theory is the logical result of using a new method on a
new type of data.
As there usually is an interrelation between object, method and theory in any
field of study which ought to be critically reflected by any researcher (cf. e.g. Bald
1995: 104), changes on the object and method side are likely to result in changes on
the theoretical side too (cf. Hunston & Francis 2000: 250; Stubbs 1996: 232). According to Tognini-Bonelli (1996a: 54) "[a] corpus can be used in different ways in order
to validate, exemplify or build up a language theory". The following section will serve
to show under which circumstances such a new theory build-up is likely to occur.
.. Corpus-based vs. corpus-driven approaches
The corpus-based and the corpus-driven approach can be regarded as two different opposing disciplines within corpus linguistics.7 It is assumed by the pioneers in
corpus-driven linguistics that their relatively new approach8 (in contrast to corpusbased approaches) is capable of leading to a new theoretical framework of the language.
What it actually is that makes CDL more theory-prone than CBL becomes obvious
when we look at the ways in which corpus-based and corpus-driven linguists respond
to the following three questions which are central to corpus research:
1. What is the status of the data and how and when (i.e. at which stage in the
research) is the corpus approached?
Chapter 2. The theoretical basis of the study
2. Does corpus annotational material, i.e. any kind of information which can be
added to the plain text (e.g. part-of-speech tags), rather have positive or negative
effects on the research? and
3. Do we as researchers have to allow alterations of the system and should we be
prepared to change existing theories in the light of corpus evidence?
It will now in turn be explained how these questions are dealt with in CBL and CDL.
The term "corpus-based" is often used by corpus researchers as a general or cover
term to refer to any kind of corpus-informed or corpus-inspired research, i.e. any studies using corpus data in one way or another. In what follows here, "corpus-based"
will be used in a more restricted sense. Following Tognini-Bonelli's fundamental work
in this area, I will use the term to distinguish corpus-driven approaches from noncorpus-driven approaches. It may well be, however, that a few linguists, who label their
work "corpus-based" in fact use a corpus-driven approach to their object of study.
As Jan Aarts (2000: 26) states, a corpus is nowadays often used "as a testing ground
for hypotheses". This statement provides an insight into the role of corpora in CBL.
Corpus-based linguists do not put the corpus at the centre of their research but see it
as a welcome tool which provides them with frequency data, attested illustrative examples, or with answers to questions of grammaticality or acceptability. Such linguists
may be regarded as "instrumentalists" as they use corpora as instruments alongside other research strategies and other types of data. According to Tognini-Bonelli
(1996a: 65), "the corpus-based approach refers to a type of methodology where the
commitment to the data as a whole is not ultimately very strict or systematic." Researchers go to a corpus with pre-formulated ideas and fixed categories in mind in
order to prove a certain hypothesis or to "exemplify existing theories" usually "theories that were formulated before large corpora became available" (Tognini-Bonelli
1996a: 55).9 It is therefore very unlikely that an alteration of a theory is suggested by
linguists whose work is corpus-based, no matter how significantly the data observed
differ from their pre-conceived ideas (for strategies of accommodating theory and data
in such a case see Tognini-Bonelli 1996b, Section 2.4 and 2001, Ch. 4).
Corpus-based linguists usually favour corpus-annotation. As they want to empirically test a theory, many researchers have their data annotated according to this theory
to then easily get a quantification of their categories. As the research carried out by Geoffrey Leech and his colleagues at Lancaster University has shown, annotated corpora
can indeed be very useful tools, for instance if one aims to automatically distinguish
items which have the same form but which belong to different word classes, e.g. instances of the verb form "meeting" and of the noun "meeting". McEnery and Wilson
(2 2001: 32) thus argue that "the utility of the corpus is considerably increased by the
provision of annotation." The commitment to annotated data can, however, also be
considered dangerous, since the annotation of text means an abstraction of the data to
certain categories (e.g. word classes). These categories seem to be more important than
the actual data and the actual meaning of a lexical item may be obscured in this an-


notational process. Corpus-based linguists are thus further away from their data than
corpus-driven linguists.
Corpus-driven linguists are aware of the possible negative effects corpus annotation can have on their research. It is important for them to try not to let other
researchers's ideas and existing theories guide or influence them too much in approaching the data. For instance, in the BNC "it" is always tagged as <w PNP>it (i.e. as
"personal pronoun"), regardless of whether it is a pronoun which refers cataphorically
to a noun, as in it's just a little article about recycling in Egypt, or a dummy subject,
as in it's obvious that the people in Harlow like that type of thing. So even though the
corpus is tagged, it is not possible to search for "it" as dummy subject. On the other
hand, the programmer of a corpus tagger may have decided to use several different
tags for an item that the corpus user would always classify in only one way. In such a
context annotation can indeed be seen as problematic: "With annotated corpora you
are using other people's views of the language." (Michael Barlow, personal communication) Annotation does not necessarily mean an enrichment of the data. It may thus
be considered a safer option to keep the text as clean as possible (cf. Sinclair 1991: 9).
Instead of relying on annotation, linguists who take a corpus-driven approach search
by word-form (e.g. for the string "meeting") and then sort the data by superficial similarity (e.g. the left-hand context of the word) (cf. Hunston & Francis 2000: 19). Sinclair
(2000a: 37) describes this procedure as follows:
In corpus-driven linguistics you do not use pre-tagged text, but you process the
raw text directly and then the patterns of this uncontaminated text are able to be
observed. (my emphasis)
This quote also hints at the centrality of the text in CDL, i.e. the data stored on the
computer. CDL means taking corpus evidence seriously. Findings are directly derived
from the data; no filtering through existing concepts is supposed to take place. TogniniBonelli states that
[i]n a corpus-driven approach the commitment of the linguist is to the integrity
of the data as a whole, and descriptions aim to be comprehensive with respect to
corpus evidence. (1996a: 69)
[. . .] the attempt of the corpus-driven linguist is to keep in constant touch with
the evidence and to build up the theory step by step in the presence of massive
corpus testimony (1996a: 70).
This strong focus on attested instances of language use does not imply that CDL seeks
to banish intuition (cf. Tognini-Bonelli 2001: 91, 185). The process of data evaluation still requires the researcher's subjective judgements which are based on previous
experience as a language learner and user. However, corpus data should not only supplement intuitive data but precede them. It follows from all this that working corpusdriven means that the evidence must never be ignored but has to be accepted and
reflected in new theories (cf. Sinclair 1991: 4). New theoretical statements are derived
from the data and have to be fully consistent with the corpus evidence. This proves
that, given the situation that the data does not fit the theory, corpus-driven researchers
take a different stance from corpus-based linguists.
Even though he did not use this label at the time of writing, John Sinclair in his
1991 seminal monograph Corpus, Concordance, Collocation presented a clear account
of the corpus-driven approach, describing it as a "new view of language" (1991: 1) and
showed "how the corpus evidence can stimulate new linguistic hypotheses" (1991: 9).
In this context the work of Michael Barlow also fits in the corpus-driven framework
as it describes the use of corpora "as a fundamental part of theory construction"
(1996: 2). To answer the third question formulated above, it can be said that corpusdriven linguists are certainly willing to alter existing theories or even work towards the
development of a new language system.
I will now briefly respond to the question "What can CDL do that other corpus
linguistic approaches cannot do?" Certainly, the major advantage of the corpus-driven
approach is its ability to lead to new theoretical insights into language. As Hunston and
Francis (2000: 249) argue, the study of language phenomena in a large corpus of authentic texts "will lead to observations about the language that it has not been possible
to make before." We learn how language really works, how it is used in communicative
situations, and, consequently, find out how it ought to be taught. I do not see any good
reason why language learners (and their teachers) should not be presented with the actual facts about the language. Thus, if a large group of people is supposed to benefit
from CDL, the insights corpus-driven approaches lead us to must not be kept secret
among linguists but have to be shared with language practitioners.
It will, however, probably take some time before the investigations of CDL will
have a direct impact on language teaching. Unfortunately, language teaching classrooms so far have not been very much affected (if at all) by the changes that are
taking place in contemporary linguistic theory. Hopefully, by taking a corpus-driven
approach to one selected language phenomenon, i.e. the English progressive, the
present study will be able to contribute to affecting language teaching in a positive
and forward-looking way.
. Contextual approaches to the study of language
According to Aarts (2002: 6), the corpus-driven approach as described in the previous
chapter can "be looked upon as an operationalization of Firth's ideas about the essential role of context in linguistic description" (cf. also Tognini-Bonelli 1996a: 73). Hence
an analysis that follows the principles of CDL by definition has to refer back to the
work of J. R. Firth and other British contextualists who were inspired by Firth's ideas.
This chapter will therefore deal with a few central concepts of contextual approaches
to linguistics as proposed and developed by John Firth and one of his followers, John
Sinclair, respectively.


.. John R. Firth
John Rupert Firth (1890–1960), who was appointed the first chair of General Linguistics at an English university in 1944 (cf. Bazell et al. 1966: v, Honeybone Forthcoming,
and Seuren 1998: 169), can be regarded as the "father" of the British contextualist tradition of language analysis (cf. Palmer 1998: 1062). A quote from his paper "A synopsis of
linguistic theory, 1930–55" shows that Firth is clearly an empiricist: "Attested language
text duly recorded is in the focus of attention for the linguist." (Palmer ed. 1968: 199)
The importance of "actual" language for Firth's linguistic work also becomes evident
in an earlier paper:
We must take our facts from speech sequences, verbally complete in themselves
and operating in contexts of situation which are typical, recurrent, and repeatedly
observable.
(Firth 1957: 35)
Although roughly 70 years have passed since the formulation of this statement (in
1935), Firth's focus on "typical, recurrent, and repeatedly observable" situations still
sounds very modern to the corpus linguistic researcher today, who is constantly looking for language typicalities and repeated occurrences, not necessarily of contexts of
situation in Firth's sense, but of words and phrases in context.
Firth sees language as a whole, embedded in culture and society, which means that
any kind of context is of major importance, be it a broader cultural or a much narrower
lexical one. He suggests that the study of linguistics should centre around "what people
say and what they hear and in what context of situation and experience they do these
things" (Palmer ed. 1968: 171; my emphasis). This important phenomenon of "context of situation", a notion Firth borrowed from the Polish anthropologist Malinowski
(cf. Seuren 1998: 169), is often described as one of the key concepts in Firthian linguistic theory (see e.g. Palmer 1998: 1063). Referring back to Wittgenstein's (2 1958: 20)
famous quote "the meaning of a word is its use in the language", Firth stresses the necessity of presenting words "in their commonest collocations" (Palmer ed. 1968: 179)
and puts forward a suggestion which became his probably most frequently quoted
statement: "you shall know a word by the company it keeps!" (Palmer ed. 1968: 179)
Included in this quote is a definition of an important notion which was not, as people
tend to think, coined by Firth (it was used before him, for example by Jespersen) but
which became famous and widely known through his work, the notion of collocation,
now central to almost any kind of corpus-driven research. Whenever we are interested in a word's collocational behaviour, we analyse what company it keeps with other
words, i.e. which other words repeatedly or habitually occur close to this word, usually
"within a short space of each other in a text" (Sinclair 1991: 170). Barnbrook (1996: 87)
very fittingly refers to collocation as the "sociology of words". An example of a collocational relationship would be the association of "cows" with "milk" or "milking" (cf.
Palmer ed. 1968: 180). Another typical example Firth mentions is the collocability of
"night" and "dark" (cf. Firth 1957: 196). Collocations, as defined by Firth, "are quite
simply the mere word accompaniment, the other word-material in which they are most
commonly or most characteristically embedded." (Palmer ed. 1968: 180)
A second important notion used (and coined) by Firth is that of colligation. What
collocation is on a lexical level of analysis, colligation is on a syntactic level. The term
does not refer to the repeated combinations of concrete word forms but to the way
in which word classes co-occur or keep habitual company in an utterance. An example would be the frequent colligation of personal pronouns in 2L position, i.e. two
positions to the left, of a progressive verb form (e.g. I think she 's keeping you on.
BNC_spoken). Firth himself uses this term to deal with meaning on the level of syntax
and defines colligation "as the interrelation of grammatical categories in syntactical
structure" (Palmer ed. 1968: 183).
The concepts of collocation and colligation can also be found in the work of John
Sinclair. In the next section it will be shown how Sinclair further developed Firthian
concepts and how he applied them to corpus-driven analyses.
.. John McH. Sinclair
John McHardy Sinclair can be seen as one of the most innovative and visionary figures
in contemporary English linguistics and certainly counts among the leading corpus
linguistic researchers. His works clearly reflect a strong Firthian influence. For Sinclair
context is all important in any kind of linguistic study. One of the "precepts" he formulates in an article on the impact of "[c]orpus evidence in language description" is
"[i]nspect contexts" (1997: 34).10 For Sinclair (1987b: 320) "[i]t is clear that words do
not occur at random in a text" (cf. also Sinclair 1991: 110), i.e. when they are combined
in an utterance or in a text, words do not behave according to an open-choice principle
or a slot-and-filler model. This observation led to the formulation of the idiom principle, a model of language interpretation which expresses that language is much more
repetitive than most people think or perceive it to be:
The principle of idiom is that a language user has available to him or her a large
number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices.
(Sinclair 1987b: 320)
It implies that the study of language must include an examination of "the way in which
patterns recur" (Sinclair 1966: 410). The idiom principle can be seen as an exemplification or illustration of Firth's concepts of collocation and colligation. In other words,
typical co-occurrences of words and word classes show the idiom principle in use and
make the phenomenon of co-selection an important one for neo-Firthian linguists (cf.
Stubbs 1993: 14).
Sinclair adds the notions of semantic preference and semantic prosody as further
steps in contextual analysis to Firth's concepts of collocation and colligation. A summary of the central concepts of his Firthian analytic approach to language is presented
by Sinclair's method of contextual analysis as described in Tognini-Bonelli 2001 (p. 19)
and as taught by Sinclair himself on his intensive corpus linguistics courses at the


Tuscan Word Centre, Italy.11 I would like to refer to Sinclair's analytical method as
the 3C2S-method, the five letters standing for the starting point and the four steps in
the process of analysis:
Core → Collocation → Colligation → Semantic preference → Semantic
prosody.12
In this analysis you start with a lexical item of your choice (either a single word or a
multi-word item) which forms the core (or the node in your concordance). You then
observe the core's collocational and colligational patterns, i.e. you examine the lexical and syntactical co-selection of items. In the next step you search for associations
of relations of repeated words in the surrounding text to a certain semantic field and
thus determine the semantic preference of the core, "where the only guaranteed coselection is semantic, and where both the actual words and the word classes can vary."
(Sinclair 1999: 26) The final analytic step leads to insights into the meaning of the patterns and concerning the core's semantic prosody, "which gives some indication of
the communicative intent, and has an attitudinal or pragmatic orientation." (Sinclair
1999: 26) Sinclair "justifies" and exemplifies the four steps (CCSS) in a detailed and
convincing examination of the expression "naked eye", providing a clear example of
the corpus-driven approach (cf. Sinclair 1996: 6ff.).13
The fact that the present analysis is embedded in the above-mentioned contextualist framework implies that I will try to take a holistic approach to the English
progressive. Throughout the analysis, the BE +V –ing structure is not treated as an isolated syntactic phenomenon in its own right but always seen in the lexical-grammatical
and syntactic context of a concordance line. I thus take an approach to progressives
which differs from many previous accounts which try to explain the meaning of the
verb form by looking at isolated (and often constructed) examples.
. Pedagogic and didactic grammar
.. Definitions
As Leech (1988: 5) rightly observes in his state-of-the-art article on English grammar
and English grammars, "grammars come in many different varieties" and differ with
regard to features like purpose and target audience. One possible distinction which can
often be found in the literature on the topic is that between linguistic (or scientific or
theoretical) grammars on the one hand and pedagogic (or didactic or applied) grammars on the other. A linguistic grammar, mainly used by the linguist and less frequently
by language teachers or learners, is usually perceived to be rather comprehensive and
complex and often features one specific language model (see e.g. Haegeman & Guéron
1999, who give an account of English grammar from a generative perspective), whereas
a pedagogic grammar, mainly used by language learners and teachers, is generally less
comprehensive and more simplified and can combine aspects from more than one
model of the language under investigation.
A lot of research on the relationship between linguistic grammar (LG) and pedagogic grammar (PG) has been done in Germany, especially in the 1970s and 1980s,
by scholars like Bausch, Börner, Dirven, Hüllen, Jung, Klein, Mindt, Piepho, Ungerer,
and Zimmermann,14 but the LG/PG differentiation goes as far back as to the late 19th
century when Henry Sweet (1899: 138) stated that
there is an obvious distinction to be made between a grammar – whether for beginners or advanced students – which is to be assimilated completely so that the
learner at last practically knows it by heart, and one which is only for reference,
and it was picked up again in the 1960s by Chomsky (1966: 10) for whom
[a] grammar, in the traditional view, is an account of competence. It describes
and attempts to account for the ability of a speaker to understand an arbitrary
sentence of his [or her] language and to produce an appropriate sentence on a
given occasion. If it is a pedagogic grammar, it attempts to provide the student with
this ability; if a linguistic grammar, it aims to discover and exhibit the mechanisms
that make this achievement possible. (my emphasis)
It becomes obvious later in the book and in some of his other writings that Chomsky
is not so much concerned with the pedagogical side but more interested in linguistic
grammatical accounts and in the discovery of rule systems that languages are based on.
Opposed to this view, the present study will deal with the often neglected pedagogical
side of grammar.
If we assume that there is a relationship between LGs and PGs and that a PG is
somehow based on an LG, one of the central questions that arise is "What is the best
linguistic grammar to base a pedagogic grammar on?" This problem has been discussed by several linguists (see for instance Arndt 1969; Chalker 1994; Greenbaum
1988; Hudson 1992; Leech 1988; Mindt 1981a; Szałek 1982) with the overall outcome
that there is no single most appropriate LG which can serve as a basis of PGs and that a
mixture of different models or the development of an entirely new model will probably
be the best option. Researchers agree that linguistic grammars should not be directly
used in the classroom (cf. Mindt 1981a: 178; Szałek 1982: 43). There is, however, no
consensus on the question how linguistic findings can be applied to language teaching
or, put differently, how the information stored in LGs has to be processed before it can
be included in a PG.
To pedagogicise or didacticise grammar Corder suggests a "predigestion" or partial
digestion of the material found in LGs according to pedagogical guidelines:
In other words, the authors of such grammars have already organized the description or presented the data in a form which the teacher can use more or less directly
in presentation to his [or her] own pupils. (Corder 1973: 328; see also 1988: 127)
Another way of reducing complexity and of making grammatical descriptions more
suitable for the hand of the teacher (or learner) is the use of a pedagogic or didactic


filter. This filter model is described and promoted by Jung 1975, Bausch 1979, and
Börner and Vogel 1976 but rejected by Mindt 1981a as the model cannot meet the
requirements of a grammar for foreign language teaching (cf. Mindt 1981a: 179) and
as it "has no empirical basis in the form of an adequate corpus" (Dirven 1990: 2).
In addition to "pedagogic grammar" some of the above mentioned German linguists use the concept "didactic grammar" (DG) to refer to grammars used in a language learning and language teaching environment. To my knowledge, the first person
who used the term didactic grammar (or, to be more precise, the German equivalent
"didaktische Grammatik") was Werner Hüllen. According to Hüllen such a grammar has to be problem-oriented, semantically based, and relevant for language use
(cf. 1973: 5, 14). A didactic grammar is supposed to make foreign language teaching
more effective and should facilitate the language learning process (cf. Hüllen 1976: 52).
Unfortunately, there are no clear agreed-upon definitions of the concepts PG and
DG. One scholar's didactic grammar may be another researcher's pedagogic grammar.
While Dirven (1990: 1) treats "pedagogic grammar" as a general "cover term for any
learner-oriented description or presentation of foreign language rule complexes" and
includes various types of grammar in his definition, Mindt uses his DG as a general
basis on which he can then develop specific pedagogic grammars for use in different
learning contexts, at different school levels, and by different groups of pupils (cf. Mindt
1985: 172). The next subchapter will deal with the approach Mindt takes.
.. The Mindtian approach – empirical grammars
Mindt takes a clearly empirical and thus innovative approach to pedagogic and didactic grammars. He stresses the importance of corpora in language analysis and
description and bases his new model of a didactic grammar on corpora which have to
be selected according to certain didactic criteria, e.g. the teaching aims (see Section 4.1
for further discussion of this point). In the Mindtian approach it is not a particular language model or linguistic grammar which comes first in the development of didactic
and pedagogic grammars but a corpus. As Tognini-Bonelli (2001: 91) states
Mindt and others systematically derive generalisations only from tested phenomena and refuse to superimpose on the data categories which have not been derived
from, and substantiated by, the corpus evidence.
The first step in Mindt's analysis is therefore a detailed corpus-driven description of the
language that is learnt and taught. Of major importance is information on frequencies,
i.e. on the relative distribution of language items and structures (cf. Mindt 1985: 172).
According to Mindt, a didactic grammar for LT has to solve three major problems, the problems of (i) selection, (ii) progression, and (iii) presentation, on which
there usually is not much information included in linguistic grammars (cf. Mindt
1981a: 179).15 Frequency data from a corpus are needed to respond to problems (i)
and (ii). They can help to make decisions about the selection of language items for
teaching and about the sequencing of these selected items which determines the lin-
guistic progression in the course. To deal with the third problem (presentation), issues
of co-occurrence and the co-selection of lexical-grammatical structures and contextual elements are important. These issues, for instance the co-occurrence of certain
adverbials with certain tense forms and systematic empirical investigations of such
phenomena, have been largely neglected in applied linguistic research (though see
Crystal 1966 for an early study on this topic). A grammar which is descriptive, which
includes information about frequencies and co-selection derived from corpus data,
and which deals with selection, progression, and presentation criteria is called a didactic grammar (cf. Mindt 1981b: 32) and presents a useful tool for teachers and authors
of teaching materials. From this didactic grammar Mindt's procedure leads to several
pedagogic grammars which can then directly be used by learners in the foreign language classroom. What such a customised PG looks like depends on factors like school
type, course design, learner profile, or cultural context (cf. Mindt 1987: 34, 1985: 172).
Applications of Mindt's empirical grammar model can be found in his investigations of future expressions in English (cf. Mindt 1985, 1987, 1992, 1996) and modal
verbs (cf. Mindt 1995, 1996). Also worth mentioning in this context are the works
of some of Mindt's colleagues at Berlin, especially Haase, Schlüter, and Tesch, who
all used a Mindtian empirical approach to compile didactic grammars of conditionals, the present perfect, and the indefinite pronouns some and any, respectively (cf.
Haase 1995; Schlüter 2000, 2002a, 2002b; Tesch 1990). A more comprehensive didactic grammatical study is Mindt 2000 which will be dealt with later in some detail (see
Section 3.4.3).
.. The present approach
The approach taken in the present study is strongly influenced by Mindt's empirical
approach. Part of what I attempt to do in this analysis is work towards a corpusdriven communicative didactic lexical grammar of English progressives. The grammar
is corpus-driven in Tognini-Bonelli's sense, in that it puts the corpus first, takes the
evidence seriously, and derives findings in the presence of large amounts of naturally
occurring language data. It is communicative in Leech's sense, putting an emphasis on
spoken language (see Ch. 4) and on aspects of learning how to communicate successfully. Leech (1988: 14) sees a communicative grammar as the "most appropriate kind
of grammar to use as a basis for language teaching" and defines it as
a description of the grammar of a language in which grammatical forms or structures are related to the meanings which they express, and to the conditions under
which they are used. It is a grammar of performance, as well as of competence.
It may also be characterized as a study in which grammar is related to semantics,
pragmatics, and style.16
Besides, it is didactic in Mindt's sense in that it focuses on language use, starts with
an analysis of corpus data, and pays attention to the distribution of forms, functions,
and contexts of progressives. The present analysis tries to respond to this definition by


looking at connections between language structures and their meanings or functions
in real-life contexts.
Progressives in theoretical studies
and grammars of English
Even though I said above (see Sections 1.2 and 2.1) that working corpus-driven
means working, as far as possible, unaffected by existing frameworks or theoretical
descriptions, it makes sense to provide some information on previous publications
on progressives in English and see how other linguists, who take different (noncorpus-driven) approaches, deal with the topic. The "newness" of a new approach can
probably best be perceived against the background of what has been said about the
progressive by some of the leading figures in tense and aspect related research before.
Thus, in the following subsections, I will first discuss some general definitional and
terminological problems researchers have to deal with (3.1) before I will have a closer
look at the positions of a few individual scholars and give an account of the treatment
of progressives in some landmark grammars of English (3.3 and 3.4). Also, the recent
development of the progressive will be briefly described (3.2), and a summary of the
results of previous empirical studies on progressives will be given (3.5).
As this would divert the reader's attention from the central concern of the study, I
will not provide an exhaustive overview of all existing studies on the English progressive or even give a historiographic account of the literature on the subject, but only
account for some representative works. For further information on different theoretical approaches to the topic and overviews on relevant literature, the reader is referred
to Scheffer 1975, Schulze 1985, and Williams 2002.
. Problems of definition and terminology
It has already been noted in the introduction (Section 1.1) that different terms can be
used to label the verbal construction here referred to as "the progressive". A glance at
the bibliography of any work on aspect in English (including the present volume) will
suffice to support this observation. Titles including expressions like "expanded form",
"expanded tense", "the continuous", "temporary aspect", "the periphrastic form", "progressive aspect", and "the progressive" basically all deal with the same construction:
a form of to be + the present participle of a verb, e.g. are looking. This clearly hints
at a confusing situation (particularly for students and novice linguists) which can be
regarded as a terminological Babel.

Comrie, back in 1976, made a similar observation when he stated that "in discussions of aspect, as opposed to many other areas of linguistics, there is no generally
accepted terminology" (1976: 11; cf. also Klein 1974: 76). In recent years, however, linguists more and more seem to favour the term "progressive" and only rarely refer to the
"expanded" or "periphrastic" form. I therefore decided to choose this most frequently
found label. I will mostly refer to "progressive forms" or "progressives" because my
approach takes individual lexical items (-ing forms of high frequency English verbs)
as the starting point of the analysis. Sporadically, mainly in connection with the review of other studies on the topic, reference will be made to "progressive aspect". Like
the majority of linguists and grammarians, I see the progressive rather as an aspectual
phenomenon than as a tense. Utterances in the past progressive and past simple, for
instance, do not necessarily express different time orientations but only put a different
emphasis on things like continuousness or speaker attitude. It could be argued that my
use of expressions like "progressives" or "progressive aspect" in the present study implies that I have implicitly accepted a pre-exisiting theory before approaching my data,
and that this is therefore not a truly corpus-driven study. However, my decision to use
the term "progressives" instead of a less theory-bound (but surely more clumsy) label,
such as "verb forms ending in -ing, used in a particular context" was made for reasons
of clarity. Apart from the borrowing of the term "progressives", no other theoretical assumptions have been taken from previous studies. The corpus data have driven every
part of the analysis.
As Tobin (1993: 4) states "[a]spect has almost as many definitions as there are linguists who have attempted to deal with it" (see also Klein 1995: 141; Bublitz 1995: 135).
This quote leads us directly to the problem of defining the progressive. How do different linguists define progressive aspect differently and how do they account for its
function or functions? Only a few selected, at times not entirely transparent, definitions can be presented here. For more extensive overviews and more detailed literature
reviews the reader is referred to Hatcher 1951, Scheffer 1975, Ljung 1980, Sasse 2001,
and Williams 2002.
For Ota "[a]spect means the signaling of the mode of action by some grammatical device." (1963: 2; emphasis in original) Instead of in the "mode of action" Strang
sees the crucial point in the indication of the "manner in which the "action" denoted
by the verb is considered as being carried out" (2 1968: 143; my emphasis). Other linguists refer to aspect as the "character" of an event or the different "points of view"
or "standpoints" of the speaker or writer. Dahl (1998: 64), for example, considers "the
speaker's perspective" as highly important but also the "structure of a situation" which
is described differently with progressives and non-progressives. As for the main function of progressive aspect, Scheffer is probably right when he states that "[o]f all the
different basic meanings attributed to the progressive that of duration is found most
often" (1975: 21; emphasis in original). Imperfectivity and incompleteness also appear
to be key terms when accounting for the nature of the progressive (cf. the discussion
of the works of Comrie and Williams in Section 3.3). The fact that happenings in the
progressive are "not necessarily complete" is mentioned by Quirk et al. (1985: 188;
Chapter 3. Progressives in theoretical studies and grammars of English
small caps in original; cf. Section 3.4.1; see also Quirk & Greenbaum 1990: 53). In
calling the progressive "the temporary aspect", Joos (1964: 107) focuses on another
meaning feature which a number of researchers consider central: temporariness. Van
Ek, for instance, describes "the basic meaning of the progressive as heightened temporary relevance" (1969: 585; emphasis in original), centering on temporariness but also
including subjective or emphatic function features.
In the present study I am not blindly subscribing to any of the definitions mentioned here but instead try to find out more about the nature of progressives by looking
at their actual occurrence in discourse. It seems to me that the terminological and definitional problems briefly dealt with in this section call for a better, preferably empirical,
analysis and clearer description of the topic.
. The diachronic dimension: Progressives on the rise
A major reason why so many linguists see a necessity to deal with the progressive may
lie in the historical development of this verbal construction. In this study I have thus
decided to include a diachronic dimension. However, in my brief historical account I
will not go back several centuries like a number of researchers before me did (see e.g.
Jespersen 1931; Mossé 1938; Dietrich 1955; Elsness 1994; Görlach 1991; Nehls 1974;
Recktenwald 1975; Scheffer 1975; Smitterberg 2005) but instead focus on the more
recent changes related to frequencies and functions of the English progressive.
In the last few years a couple of linguists showed a growing interest in what Renouf
(2002: 29) refers to as "modern diachronic corpus linguistics", a welcome trend within
corpus linguistics which stresses the significance of investigating recent language developments on a morphological, lexical, and semantic level, and which thus contributes
to a better understanding of language as a changing phenomenon. Of key importance
in this context was the compilation of the FLOB and Frown corpora, the early 1990s
counterparts of the LOB and Brown corpora of early 1960s English17 by a research
team around Christian Mair at Freiburg University. The two newer 1 million word
corpora offer the researcher a short-term diachronic perspective and together with the
older Brown and LOB corpora enable comparisons of samples of written British and
American English over a thirty-year time span.
While Scheffer (1975: 110–113) comments on the increasing use of the progressive
in Modern English, providing quantitative evidence from some best-selling 19th and
20th century novels, Mair and Hundt (1995: 111) 20 years later support his findings
in a paper based on data from the four above-mentioned matched corpora and state
that "progressives have become more frequent over the past thirty years".18 Further
empirically-based confirmation of the increase phenomenon was given by Rydén in
1997, by Smitterberg et al. in 2000, and recently by Smith 2002. Extending the analysis
of Mair and Hundt, Smith systematically used the LOB, FLOB, Brown, and Frown
corpora to investigate ongoing changes related to the progressive and found increasing


frequencies of the present progressive in British and American English of about 30%
(cf. Smith 2002: 317).
As for a reason why progressives are on the rise, Potter (2 1975: 120) suspects that
people have a growing "desire, often vaguely and subconsciously, to make what they
say more lively and vivid". More empirically founded are the two possible explanations
that Mair and Hundt give: either the increase can be treated as a "textlinguistic or stylistic" phenomenon and "be regarded as a symptom of the "colloquialisation" of written
English" or "[i]t is treated as a grammatical phenomenon. [. . .] in cases in which the
simple form can be used alongside the progressive, the latter tends to be chosen with
increasing frequency." (Mair & Hundt 1995: 118) This would mean that the expansion in frequency of use of progressives does not go together with an expansion of the
functional repertoire. The described increase in use of the form implies an increasing
importance of dealing with the progressive. Language description must not lose track
of language development, especially not if we are concerned with pedagogical aspects.
Learners and teachers deserve to get adequate, true, and up-to-date descriptions of
the language, including information on recent trends in the use of central items or
structures. It is therefore particularly important to further investigate such language
phenomena which undergo a significant development.
. The English progressive in two influential theoretical studies
Two important monographs that deal extensively with the progressive are Comrie 1976
and Williams 2002. While Comrie's book is probably one of the most influential and
most frequently cited works on aspect of the second half of the 20th century, Williams's
much more recent publication covers later developments and theories in aspectual research and offers a new approach to dealing systematically with the opposition between
progressives and non-progressives. The central arguments of both books will be presented and evaluated in Sections 3.3.1 and 3.3.2. Let me stress again that the purpose
of this study is not to list and discuss a large number of theories on the subject but
to offer a fresh data-guided approach to progressive forms. The present chapter may
hence not be as exhaustive as some readers might expect it to be.
.. Comrie 1976
Although published almost 30 years ago, Bernard Comrie's book Aspect still presents
an influential study in theoretical linguistics and traditional grammar. In his preface
the author describes the book as an "introduction to verbal aspect and related concepts" in general which "is not concerned with any one particular language" (p. vii). A
lot of information, however, is given on the progressive as a central aspectual category
and large parts of the argumentation focus on English.
Comrie sees "aspects" as "different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation" (p. 3; see also Comrie 1985 and 1998) and treats English
constructions like he was reading as means of expressions of imperfective aspect, in this
case "the periphrastic Progressive" (p. 9), with "imperfective" indicating "a situation
in progress" (p. 19). The author states that
English has two aspectual oppositions that pervade the whole of the verbal system, that between Progressive (verb to be and verbal form of -ing) and nonProgressive, and that between Perfect (verb to have and Past Participle) and
non-Perfect. (p. 124)
With reference to the "unusually wide range" (p. 33) of the English progressive and its
extension of meaning (cf. p. 38) Comrie discusses different uses of the construction,
for instance the according to several scholars (see also Jespersen 1931: 524) "typical"
framing context in which "the Progressive indicates a situation [. . .] that frames another situation", as in "when I visit John, he'll be reciting his latest poems" (p. 30), or
more specific cases in which progressives refer "to a habitual situation that holds for a
relatively limited period, as in "we're going to the opera a lot these days" (p. 37, italics in
original). The author also refers to the progressive function of adding "greater emotive
effect" (p. 37) than the non-progressive form and gives a typical example in which the
form co-occurs with the adverbial always: "she's always buying far more vegetables than
they can possibly eat" (p. 37). To Comrie these last two "specific uses" of the progressive appear to be idiosyncrasies which constitute deviations from its basic meaning of
indicating a contingent situation (cf. p. 38).
Concerning the question which verbs go with the progressive and which do not,
the author first refers to the traditional classification of verbs into the non-overlapping
categories of statives (e.g. be) and nonstatives (e.g. run) but then notes that "verbs
are treated sometimes as stative, sometimes as nonstative, depending on the particular meaning they have in the given sentence." (p. 36) He concludes that "the general
rule seems to be that lexically stative verbs can be used nonstatively and appear in the
Progressive" and provides a few examples of stative verbs in progressive use, e.g. "Fred
is being silly" and "I'm understanding more about quantum mechanics as each day goes
by" (p. 36).
On the whole it can be said that Comrie's account is quite detailed and informative
but in large parts rather speculative. His ideas are not supported by any massive evidence, the selected examples he provides are invented rather than authentic, and there
is no information on frequencies of occurrence of the different special progressive
functions Comrie mentions. It thus remains difficult to see how special (or idiosyncratic) functions like the emotive use of the progressive in fact are. The author does
not manage to find a system which can give a fully comprehensive characterisation of
progressive uses in (contemporary) English and which could account for all described
"idiosyncrasies". What Comrie provides the reader with, though, is an interesting discussion of the central concepts and features that are used in the non-empirical (and
partially also in the empirical) literature on aspect in general and the progressive in


particular. By means of reviewing a more recent publication on the topic, the next
subsection will try to show how some of these central concepts can be used as starting
points for the adoption of a new, maybe more comprehensive, theoretical approach to
English progressives.
.. Williams 2002
In his monograph entitled Non-progressive and Progressive Aspect in English Christopher Williams gives a detailed account of the differences between simple and progressive forms. Starting from the observation that "the theoretical issues raised so far by
scholars do not provide an exhaustive or wholly accurate account" (p. 13) of the use of
progressives in English, the author provides many new observations which lead him to
formulating his own theory concerning progressive aspect: the theory of "susceptibility
to change".
Strongly influenced by Renaat Declerck's publications on the subject, Williams
gives a general overview of the state-of-play of progressive aspectual research while
concentrating on the "more 'difficult' areas where linguists' views often differ
markedly" (p. 15), for instance the compatibility of progressives with apparently permanent situations or the progressive with future time reference. Williams's interpretation of the progressive differs in several points from what linguists before him found
(e.g. Hirtle 1967 or Scheffer 1975). For instance, he does not subscribe to the common
view that non-progressive "always implies perfectivity" (p. 36). Also, imperfectivity for
Williams is not restricted to the progressive but as well covers continuousness and habituality. As "intrinsic features of progressive aspect in English" the author lists (p. 50):
i. that a situation be deemed as being 'in progress';
ii. that a situation be deemed as being in some way incomplete;
iii. that any situation conveyed by using the progressive form implicitly contains
a 'piece' of that same situation prior to the moment in which it is viewed as
occurring.
Williams then puts forward a new hypothesis of explaining the use of progressive (and
non-progressive) aspect which says that "the use of the progressive form implies that
the situation referred to in the verb may be susceptible to change in some way" (p. 87),
i.e. it is easily affected by some internal or external factor; it "leaves "room for something to come"" (p. 88). He draws upon a number of convincing examples to show that
his theory can also account for some of the trickier cases of progressive use, e.g. those
which describe apparently permanent situations or those which refer to the future.
However, only some of Williams's examples are authentic "used" language examples
(in Brazil's 1995 terms);19 the rest of them have been invented or taken from previous
theoretical studies. It may be questioned how appropriate it is to describe language on
the basis of made-up instead of real examples. As an overall evaluation we can say that
the author offers a more comprehensive and less speculative approach and manages
to explain more of the rather problematic progressive aspect related phenomena than
other researchers before him (including Comrie). Still, it is doubtful whether what
is postulated in his study can be considered the "final truth", mainly because insufficient effort is made to cover larger amounts of natural data. It cannot be taken for
granted that the examples given by the author provide a sound test bed for his theory
of susceptibility to change. To make clear in how far the present approach differs from
Williams's (and other linguists's) accounts, I will refer back to his book (and other
studies) in Chapter 4.
. The progressive in recent linguistic and empirical grammars
After I have taken a brief look at the presentation of progressive aspect in two important theoretical studies, I will now turn to four recent important grammar books.
Sections 3.4.1 to 3.4.4 discuss the treatment of the progressive in grammars which
represent different degrees of "theoreticalness" and "empiricalness", with the cases
"fully theoretical" and "fully empirical" seen as endpoints of an imaginary scale. I
will focus mainly on findings related to different functions of progressives and on
the grammar books's commitment to natural (corpus) data. All grammars are "postcorpus-boom" grammars, i.e. grammars that were published after the first electronic
corpora of English had become available to linguistic researchers.
I have selected Quirk et al. 1985 as the probably most comprehensive and most
widely used reference grammar of the 20th century, Biber et al. 1999 as a first entirely
corpus-based grammar of different English language registers, Mindt 2000 as the first
corpus-driven empirical grammar of the English verb system, and Huddleston and
Pullum 2002 as a most recent voluminous publication which claims to be "[t]he most
up-to-date English grammar" and "[t]he grammar for the 21st century".20
.. Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, Svartvik 1985
The volume A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (henceforth CGEL) by
Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik, published in
1985, certainly presented the reference work on English grammar for researchers and
teachers in the late 20th century and can still be regarded as an invaluable source of
information about the English language and an indispensable reference work today. As
a culmination of several decades of joint work of the four authors, who also produced
A Grammar of Contemporary English (Quirk et al. 1972), A Communicative Grammar of
English (Leech & Svartvik 1975, 2 1994), and A University Grammar of English (Quirk &
Greenbaum 1973, 2 1980), CGEL attempts to give an authoritative and comprehensive
account of English grammar which replaces previous grammars.
Within the main chapter on "The semantics of the verb phrase", 16 pages are dedicated to "progressive aspect". The authors define "aspect" as "a grammatical category


which reflects the way in which the verb action is regarded or experienced with respect
to time." (188, emphasis in original) Progressive aspect, they state, "indicates a happening in progress at a given time" (188, small caps in original) and can be decomposed
functionally into three meaning components,
not all of which need to be present in a given instance:
(a) the happening has duration
(b) the happening has limited duration
(c) the happening is not necessarily complete (198, small caps in original).
Quirk et al. then go on to deal with the compatibility (or incompatibility) of different
verb senses (states, events, and habits) with the progressive and claim that stative verbs
like own are usually unacceptable in a progressive construction but that when they
occur, "temporariness rather than permanence" is expressed, as e.g. in "[w]e are living
in the country." (199, emphasis in original) Progressive forms of event verbs such as
blow in "[t]he referee is blowing his whistle" according to CGEL convey "the idea that
an event has duration and has not yet come to an end" (199). The example "[t]he
professor is typing his own letters while his secretary is ill" is used to illustrate the
fact that the progressive can also impart habituality, but only if the habit referred to is
temporary. In this context the authors mention the "subjective feeling of disapproval"
(199) progressives may express in combination with adverbials of the always type (e.g.
always, constantly, continually).
The CGEL approach to progressive aspect is characterised by a high degree of sensitivity to progressives and verb semantics. The authors repeatedly note that depending
on the aspectual form (progressive or non-progressive) present in a certain sentence or
utterance, different interpretations of the function of the verb are required. The "nonnormal progressive" use of the stative verb hope in "I am hoping you will come", for
instance, adds the special effect of tentativeness or politeness to the utterance (202). To
sum up what is said about progressive functions, CGEL clearly supports a "one major
use plus several special uses" view. While progressives mainly express temporariness,
they may also be used to refer to future actions or to convey tentativeness (210).
As for the level of empiricalness of Quirk et al., the grammar can probably be
best described as corpus-informed. It includes occasional information on frequencies
of grammatical structures based on the Survey of English Usage (SEU), LancasterOslo/Bergen (LOB), and Brown corpora, but does not present any systematic detailed
distributional data or statistics. Although the authors mention some corpora they have
been working with, there is no clear attribution to sources. It remains unclear which
examples (and how many of them) actually come from the SEU, Brown, or LOB and
which have been constructed or taken from previous studies. Particularly in cases in
which one grammatical construction is contrasted with another (e.g. "Joan sang well"
vs. "Joan was singing well", 197, emphasis in original), it becomes evident that the
examples have been invented for illustrative purposes. On a scale of theoreticalness
I would see Quirk et al. 1985 somewhere in the middle, as they neither follow any
particular existing theory (unlike Universal Grammar) nor are they fully committed to
accounting for natural data. Where the 1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written
English can be found on the same scale and in how far it follows (or differs from) the
CGEL, will be dealt with in the next subsection.
.. Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, Finegan 1999
The 1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (henceforth LGSWE) by
Douglas Biber, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan,
can certainly be regarded as a landmark in linguistic analysis and description. As the
authors state in their preface, the book is not meant to compete with the above described large-scale CGEL but to complement it (cf. viii). Even though LGSWE "does
not attempt to aspire" (viii) to the comprehensiveness of Quirk et al., it extends the
scope of CGEL by being entirely corpus-based. In focussing on register-dependent linguistic choices and in putting an emphasis on spoken English (and its differences to
written English), Biber and his colleagues go beyond CGEL. Their account is more
functional and discourse-oriented and less structural than Quirk et al.'s.21
In LGSWE a five-page subsection of chapter six "Variation in the verb phrase:
tense, aspect, voice, and modality" deals exclusively with progressive aspect in different spoken and written registers of British and American English, while reference to
progressives is also made in a few other parts of the book, e.g. in connection with future time or relative clauses. Aspect, according to LGSWE, "relates to considerations
such as the completion or lack of completion of events or states described by a verb"
(460). The definition of progressive aspect closely follows that in CGEL which stresses
the being in progress, "usually for a limited duration" (470), of the respective situation
at some point in time. The authors distinguish between present progressive aspect,
which functions to describe "events that are currently in progress or are about to take
place in the near future" and past progressive aspect, used to refer to "events that were
in progress or about to take place at some earlier time" (470), and omit perfect progressives because of their rarity in the Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus
(LSWEC). Progressives, and particularly present progressives, they note, are most often found in conversation while written registers overall contain lower numbers of the
form (cf. 462).
Under the heading "Lexical associations of progressive aspect" Biber et al. first list
and then discuss different types of verbs that are more or less likely to occur in progressive constructions. In this respect the authors follow the example of CGEL where verb
semantics (as noted above) plays an important role. LGSWE, however, goes further in
providing rough frequencies (e.g. "more than ten times per million words", 472) for
the occurrence of particular verbs with the progressive aspect and in stressing that,
contrary to what many researchers state, "both dynamic and stative verbs are included
among the most common verbs in the progressive" (472). Also, LGSWE pays more attention to context and lexical-grammatical features than CGEL. As crucial factors that
help determine the use of (stative and dynamic) verbs in the progressive, the authors


mention context features, e.g. human subjects as agents. They thus manage to account
for the apparently contradictory use of stative verbs in progressive constructions as
e.g. in "I was looking at that one just now" (473) where the human subject "I" controls
the visual perception. On the other hand, a stative verb like see is only rarely used
with progressives with animate subjects because it describes a state which cannot be
actively controlled by the agent. On the whole, the discussion of progressives and their
functions in LGSWE is less comprehensive in not accounting for as many special cases
of progressive meanings but much more empirically founded than in CGEL.
As we could see, LGSWE is empirical and descriptive rather than theoretical and
prescriptive. Ample evidence from natural used language stored in LSWEC is given
throughout the book. On our imagined theoreticalness scale Biber et al. would hence
be found further towards the empirical end than Quirk et al. However, as LGSWE
largely follows CGEL in its terminology and descriptive framework and does not develop many new categories or descriptive labels to meet new types and larger amounts
of data than were analysed by Quirk and his colleagues, the approach taken can not be
called corpus-driven and still deviates in some points from the approach described in
Section 2.1 of this study.
.. Mindt 2000
Dieter Mindt's An Empirical Grammar of the English Verb System (henceforth EGEVS),
published in 2000 as "the result of ten years' work" claims to use "a new approach to
English" and, unlike LGSWE, to make "no borrowing from previous grammars" (6).
The two most important characteristics of EGEVS are (i) that the grammar is "fully
corpus-based" and (ii) that it is "especially geared to the requirements of ELT" (Mindt
2002: 91).
In his description of the English verb system, which this grammar is restricted
to, Mindt uses an inductive approach "from language to grammatical generalization"
rather than a deductive one "from pre-stated rule to example" (6). This means that,
although the author uses the label "corpus-based", according to Tognini-Bonelli's definition and my outline in Section 2.1, the approach taken in EGEVS is, in fact, rather
corpus-driven. The fact that Mindt's grammar "makes use of a number of grammatical
categories which evolved from the analysis of the data" (7) is certainly a typical feature of CDL. In that respect Mindt's procedure clearly resembles the analytic method
applied in the present study (cf. Section 1.2 above).
Progressives are dealt with in EGEVS in some detail (pages 248–265) within a
chapter on "finite verb phrases". Instead of giving some introductory definitional information on progressive aspect, the author starts straight away with a functional analysis
of the form. According to Mindt, "[t]here are nine meanings of the progressive", listed
in EGEVS in order of frequency of occurrence (cf. 248; see also Mindt 1997a: 230–232).
1. incompletion
2. temporariness
iteration/habit
highlighting/prominence
politeness/downtoning
volition/intention
matter-of-course
The author gives corpus examples for all nine meanings and then notes that the first
three (incompletion, temporariness, iteration/habit) are progressive, the other six nonprogressive meanings (cf. 250). All nine meanings "can occur in isolation with the
exclusion of other meanings" (250) but quite often meanings are combined in a single progressive utterance. In this context it may be considered problematic that the
examples given under meanings 1 to 9 are not always clear-cut cases but include different meaning features. One of the examples given to illustrate "iteration/habit", for
instance, "she was crying and jumping up and down" (249, emphasis in original),
does also express incompletion (still going on at the time of reference) and temporariness (lasting only for a limited period of time). EGEVS also provides information
on verbs that are frequently used with progressives and lists a lot of details concerning the lexical-grammatical contexts in which progressive forms are typically found.
These findings will be further discussed in Section 3.5 and, in comparison with my
own empirical findings, throughout Chapter 4.
Concerning the grammar's degree of theoreticalness, it has already been noted that
EGEVS follows a corpus-driven approach of analysis and description and can therefore
be found very close to the empirical endpoint of the theoreticalness scale. In not assuming any descriptive frameworks other than the one evolving from the corpus data,
Mindt's book is probably the least theoretical (and most empirical) of the grammars
discussed so far. Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear which subsets from which corpora were used during which stage of Mindt's research. On this subject, the author
only states the following: "During the final stage of our work we had access to more
than 240 million words of English" (6) and gives a list of corpora used at the end of the
volume (596).22
.. Huddleston, Pullum 2002
The fourth and last grammar under discussion is The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (henceforth CamGEL to avoid confusion with Quirk et al. 1985) by
Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum, published in 2002. CamGEL claims to represent "a major advance over previous grammars by virtue of drawing systematically
on the linguistic research carried out on English since the 1950s" and to be "based
on a sounder and more consistent descriptive framework than previous large-scale
grammars" (cover blurb). The grammar thus obviously competes with the 17 years
older CGEL, although it acknowledges Quirk et al.'s book as an "indispensable source


of data and ideas" (xvi). What the authors of CamGEL state to do is "give a synchronic, descriptive grammar of general-purpose, present-day, international Standard
English" (2).
The CamGEL approach to grammatical description is more specifically theoryfocussed than that of CGEL and much less empirically oriented than Biber et al.'s and,
even more so, Mindt's (cf. 18–19). As for the data used in connection with writing
this grammar, the authors mention a wide range of sources, mainly of an introspective
kind or referring back to other linguists's works, but also including three, by today's
standards, small corpora of American, Australian, and British English: the one million
word Brown, ACE (Australian Corpus of English), and LOB corpora. Empiricists may
find it doubtful whether three million words of written English from the 1960s (Brown
and LOB) and the 1980s (ACE) can actually provide a sound basis for "the most
up-to-date English grammar, reflecting decades of change" (CamGEL promotional
description), even if the authors are not aiming at a statistical account of grammar
including frequencies (like Biber et al.) but instead focus more on the theoretical level
and only draw upon corpus evidence for illustrative purposes.23 As also noted with
respect to Quirk et al.'s volume, the sources of the individual examples in CamGEL are
unclear and the reader is left guessing which examples come from which source.24
One of the main chapters of the grammar entitled "The verb" includes a detailed
subchapter on tense, aspect, and mood, which in turn has a 10-page subsection exclusively dedicated to progressive aspect. "The term aspect", the authors write, "applies to
a system where the basic meanings have to do with the internal temporal constituency
of the situation" (117, emphasis in original). Echoing Comrie's definition of perfective
and imperfective aspect, they note that
[t]he difference [between progressive and non-progressive] is a matter of how the
speaker views the situation. The progressive takes an internal view, looking at it
from the inside, as it were, as something ongoing, in progress. The unmarked,
non-progressive, version takes an external view (117).
In large parts the account of progressives closely follows the work of Comrie (cf. Section 2.3.1). According to CamGEL, the progressive has one basic use, namely "the
expression of progressive aspectuality" (162), and two specialised uses, both related
to future time reference ("The progressive futurate" and "Will + progressive", 171).
Progressive aspectuality requires certain meaning features: the situation described is
presented as in progress, as durative, as dynamic, and as having limited duration. It is
viewed imperfectively, and the reference time is "a mid-interval within" the situation
time (163). These meaning features are then discussed and exemplified in turn. With
regard to the duration feature Huddleston and Pullum, like Comrie, stress "the frequent use of the progressive for a situation presented as a frame or background for a
perfective situation" (166). It remains to be seen whether "framing" really represents
such a central function of progressives in real language use (see Section 4.4.5).
One longer subsection of the chapter on progressive aspect deals with the compatibility of certain verb classes "falling around the boundary between states and
occurrences" (169) with progressives, e.g. "verbs of perception and sensation" such as
see, hear, or feel. Throughout the tense and aspect chapter the authors put an emphasis on different kinds of situations, e.g. processes vs. achievements or occurrences
vs. states, the latter of which do not normally occur with progressives (cf. 119). With
respect to verb-progressive compatibilities CamGEL makes a number of informally
statistical claims expressing "how easily" some verbs take the form, whether they are
"possible" with it, or what verbs tend "to favour the progressive" (170, 171). A real
statistical analysis, however, has apparently not been carried out. The reader certainly
gets a lot of information on different interpretations of progressive constructions but,
unfortun