Zooming in on Verbs in the Progressive: A Collostructional and Correspondence Analysis Approach

Abstract

Quantitative corpus-linguistic approaches that are compatible with cognitive-constructional theories of language are on the increase in variationist English studies, but remain rare when it comes to study of the progressive aspect. The purpose of this study is therefore to road-test a two-step methodological approach in the investigation of over 6000 progressive constructions in five comparable corpora: the British, US, India, and Singapore components of the International Corpus of English (ICE), in addition to the recently released Corpus of Dutch English. Because the latter corpus followed the ICE design, it provides a valuable opportunity to investigate an as yet virtually unexplored population of non-native English users across seven different genres. First, successive covarying collexeme analyses were conducted of the variables verb and variety and then semantic domain and variety. The results confirmed several previous findings about, among other things, the strong association of progressive knowing with Indian English. Next, the results were fed into a correspondence analysis to explore, for the first time, the interactions between three variables in the use of progressive marking, semantic domain, variety and genre, revealing complex interplay between them. Ultimately, by contributing to the stock of methodological approaches used in variationist studies of the progressive aspect, the study provides a first step towards the development of detailed constructional profiles of the progressive across English varieties.