It is generally reported that the progressive in IrE is more frequent than in mainstream standard Englishes7 In the spoken component of ICE-IRL, there are 6,686 progres- sives, with a frequency of 10,620 pmw.8 For ICE-GB, the frequency is 8,368 pmw based on the DICE subcorpus of spoken ICE-GB (Leech et al. 2009: Table A6.4). For syn- chronic contrast, spoken ICE-Ireland thus exceeds spoken ICE-GB by 25%. The figure for spoken DSEU is lower: 6,043 pmw.
Until the late 18th century, such written evidence as there exists shows that the frequency of progressives in IrE was no different from that in BrE at that time (McCafferty & Amador-Moreno 2012a: 271–273). The frequency of the progressive in CORIECOR increases considerably during the late 18th and early 19th century. In the period 1761–1790, progressives in Irish letters as evidenced in the CORIECOR Corpus (200 pmw; q.v. McCafferty & Amador-Moreno 2012a: 271–273) were twice as frequent as those in English letters (105 pmw; q.v. McCafferty & Amador-Moreno 2012a: 271–273). By 1840, the decade in which the progressive occurs most frequently in the CORIECOR corpus, its frequency for that single genre, once extrapolated, was 4,170 pmw (McCafferty & Amador-Moreno 2012a: 271–273).
The explanation offered by McCafferty & Amador-Moreno (2012a: 269, 271) for this increase is that the appearance of progressives in writing was an innovation in writing caused by the acquisition of literacy in English among those who switched from Irish to English as their mother tongue. The implication is that, being transferred from Irish, due to language shift, it must already have been prevalent in speech. The evidence provided by the CORIECOR letters (McCafferty & Amador-Moreno (2012a, 2012b) reflects an informal written style based on vernacular spoken usage. Most of the learning of English was done orally without recourse to literacy in Irish or English (cf. FitzGerald 1984), so that the literacy which was being acquired in English was based on speech patterns, including those transferred from Irish. As the progressive is shown in every subperiod to be more frequent in the CORIECOR letters than the more general corpora of 18th and 19th century English with which the letter data are compared, McCafferty and Amador-Moreno (2012a: 269) conclude that not only is the
7. E.g. Ronan (2001), Filppula (2003), Filppula et al. (2008: 176–181).
8. The raw occurrences were calculated using AntConc 3.3.5m (downloaded from 〈http://
www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html〉) to search for each form of BE followed by a wild- card+ing string both adjacently and up to four items in between; the results concordances were exported into Word and manually edited, discarding any false positives and doubles, which arose in the AntConc searches because of ICE mark-up conventions. The individual results were then aggregated. Files for each set of items have been retained.
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.comThe progressive in Irish English 101 language of those letters “more colloquial or vernacular” than English generally at the time, but also that from those written frequencies we may extrapolate similar frequen- cies for how it was in the spoken language.
Of the 20 progressive categories specified in Section 3 above, it is only possible, within the confines of this chapter, and for obvious reasons of space, to discuss eight of them. For some categories, moreover, more quantitative information upon which obser- vations and comparisons could be made would be required, including for ICE-IRL.
4.1 The event or activity progressive: Analysis (§3.1)
The essence of the basic progressive construction is a reference to a dynamic activity from the perspective of its being undertaken but incomplete at the time point in the proposition, which may but need not coincide with the moment of speaking. Such events are durative (rather than punctual) and either conclusive (telic) or noncon- clusive (atelic). Using the typology of Quirk et al. (1985: 201), we may classify (52) as an example of a nonconclusive and durative activity (rain), (53) a nonconclusive and durative activity (drink intransitively), (54) and (55) conclusive and durative processes (grow up and improve), and (56) a conclusive and durative accomplishment (drink transitively).
(52) You stay in because it’s raining (ICE-IRL S1B-041) (53) Ye were just drinking when ye went to the pub like wasn’t it (ICE-IRL
S1A-068)
(54) Certainly when I was growing up in West Belfast there was a mixed community there of uhm people from different backgrounds and
professions and so on (ICE-IRL S2B-028)
(55) Uh and emphasising again the point that whereas uh all the evidence would suggest that the position of Catholics is improving uh at a slowish rate but
it’s still improving (ICE-IRL S1B-024)
(56) When you’re drinking the stuff I don’t know just (ICE-IRL S1A-058) No suggestion has ever been made that, in terms of those semantic functions or their frequencies, there are any differences between IrE and EngE in this progressive cate- gory. Any more detailed analysis and comparison, however, would need further inves- tigation and would be beyond the scope of the present chapter.9
9. Without further research, I have not been able to find distributional information about subcategories of active progressives in spoken ICE-GB, with which comparison with spoken ICE-IRL might readily be made. Detailed, quantitative studies of passive progressives such as Smith and Rayson (2007) seem not to have been carried out for active progressives.
www.ebook777.com
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com
102 John M. Kirk
Examples (52) – (56) are of the progressive active. ICE-IRL would also appear in general to reflect the distribution for progressive passives across registers found by Smith & Rayson (2007) for ICE-GB and the British National Corpus. In ICE-IRL the progressive passive occurs most frequently in informational prose with newspaper reporting yielding 784 tokens pmw, official and regulatory documents 750, and busi- ness letters 695. The frequencies for ICE-IRL reflect the consistency identified by Smith and Rayson (2007) for the progressive passive in media, parliamentary and institutional settings, a consistency which also reflects the low frequency of progressive passives in spontaneous situations such as face-to-face conversations (32.2 pmw) and telephone conversations (31.9 pmw), where it clearly does not feature as part of a speaker’s active repertoire. Whereas the average frequency of progressive passive in spoken texts is 153 pmw, that of written texts in ICE-Ireland is not surprisingly almost double that at 291 pmw – no doubt in view of the functionality and formality of the passive.
4.2 The habitual nonbounded progressive: Analysis (§3.3)
As well as durative meanings, progressives can also express habituality. Thus, with durative verbs referring to an atelic or noncontinuative activity, habituality is expressed through the modal would, the semi-modal use(d) (to), the auxiliary bes V-ing10 and the auxiliaries do(es) be V-ing, the last two of which are regularly singled out as a particu- larly Irish usage.11 Nevertheless, there appear to be few examples in the CORIECOR corpus, leading McCafferty and Amador-Moreno (2012a: 276) to conclude that, “if these uses are today especially typical of Irish English, our results suggest they are innovations that have taken root only after the 1840s”. In the present day, however, the differences between IrE and BrE with regard to habitual progressives could hardly be more marked: 110 pmw for ICE-IRL vs 8 pmw for LLC. Filppula et al. (2008: 176–181) report densities of usage in IrE (and Hebridean English) that are three to four times higher than in other Englishes. A comparison by Filppula et al. (2008: 178) of very different datasets provides figures of 530 pmw for IrE and 140 pmw for BrE. Habitual progressives with auxiliary or modal verbs would thus seem an overwhelmingly IrE construction and hardly at all an EngE one.
4.3 The single occasion repetitive progressive: Analysis (§3.4)
This category could be labelled ‘the frequentative punctual progressive’, separate from
‘the mental nonbounded progressive’ discussed in Sections 3.6 and 4.5. Although this
10. Bes usually suggests a weak and/or unstressed vowel; it is occasionally written as bees usually to denote a stressed or lengthened vowel quality.
11. E.g. Ronan (2001), Filppula (2003), Filppula et al. (2008: 176–181), McCafferty & Amador- Moreno (2012a, 2012b).
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.comThe progressive in Irish English 103 category has prima facie plausibility as a functional category of the progressive, its use in IrE would appear to have been reinforced under transferred influence from Irish, as various studies suggest, including Ronan (2001), Filppula (2003), Hickey (2007), and Filppula et al. (2008: 176–181). In Irish, it would seem that the distinction between stative and dynamic verbs so commonly made of English did not exist, so that each type of verb became marked for recurrence using the progressive, whether used punc- tually or duratively. Thus in IrE there is a tense-aspectual category denoting a single instance of an activity but with repeated actions which comprise that single occur- rence of activity, as examples (9) – (11) show. Thus it is the combination of semantic constraints from within the English system as well as contact with vernacular usage transferred from Irish which have led to those functions becoming expressed through the progressive construction in IrE, particularly with verbs of punctual mental states – so-called ‘stative’ verbs such as wonder and think, the iterative senses of which are discussed in Sections 3.6 and 4.5. In (57) recurrence within a single instance (at the moment) is reinforced by the adverbial a lot, whereas in (58) in a broadcast interview the speaker is literally thinking on his feet in response to the previous utterance.
(57) It’s not you sort of you do it so often that you don’t think about it but at the moment I’m thinking about it a lot probably (ICE-IRL S1A-036) (58) Well I’m thinking actually of an Irish composer called Gerald Barry
(ICE-IRL S1B-049) 4.4 The futurate progressive: Analysis (§3.5)
ICE-IRL yields examples of the futurate progressive with little difference from its use in the EngE system, especially with harmonic adverbials of relatively close future time such as tomorrow:
(59) I’m bringing the net curtains tomorrow (ICE-IRL S1A-050) (60) Well Bad Manners are playing tomorrow night (ICE-IRL S1A-092) (61) Or is Albert coming tomorrow is he (ICE-IRL S1A-067) However, the futurate progressive contrasts with the ‘future-as-a-matter-of-course progressive’ (discussed above in Section 3.12).
4.5 The nonbounded stative progressive: Analysis (§3.6)
Under the influence of Irish, from which the practice transferred, stative progres- sives in the IrE vernacular function dynamically, with the -ing form interpretable as a marker of progressivity. As explained above, the functioning of stative progressives in standard English as dynamic verbs in IrE is one of the latter’s regular unmarked,
‘characteristic’ features.
www.ebook777.com
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com
104 John M. Kirk
McCafferty and Amador-Moreno (2012a: 275) observe that, in their CORIECOR data, stative progressives “have considerably higher density and account for a higher percentage of all progressives throughout the period 1770–1840 than any of the other supposedly Irish uses”, and that stative progressives also “increase a good deal in den- sity from the 1770s to the 1780s, and are more frequent in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth”. In their 1820s data stative progressives have a frequency of 1,010 pmw in the 1820s, accounting for 30% of all verb use at that time.
Based on the list of stative verbs in Leech et al. (2009: 292) covering ‘sensory perception’, ‘cognition/emotion/attitude’, ‘being & having’, and ‘stance’, the overall fre- quency of the stative progressive in spoken ICE-IRL is 1,043 pmw, on the basis of 1,099 occurrences.
Table 1. Stative verbs in the progressive in ICE-IRL
Written Spoken Total
Total 337 762 1,099
Pmw 790 1,216 1,043
% 30.7 69.3
The predominance of stative progressives in speech (at 69.3%) reinforces the con- struction’s colloquiality, as well as associated interpretive and pragmatic uses which account for part of the construction’s general increase. By contrast, Filppula et al.
(2009: 252) calculate the frequency of stative progressives in the spoken component of ICE-GB to be only nineteen pmw12 – a staggering difference!
However, a quite different frequency is presented by Kallen (2013: 88) who, on the basis of thirteen of the most frequent stative verbs, shows that the frequency of stative progressives in ICE-IRL is only three times higher than in ICE-GB (275 pmw13 vs 92 pmw for ICE-GB).14
Even in the standardised language of ICE-IRL, and averaging out frequencies in writing and speech, and different methods of calculation, the higher frequency of stative progressives in IrE could not be more striking. If they are “at best a minor player especially in British English” (Leech et al. 2009: 142), stative progressives are a major
12. Extrapolated from Filppula et al.’s frequency of 0.19 per 10,000 words and presumably calculated on the basis of all occurrences and not on a subset.
13. 275 pmw is derived from a simple addition of Kallen’s 1.53 pmw for the Republic of Ireland component and 1.22 for Northern Ireland.
14. Whereas Kallen investigated only 13 most frequent stative verbs, Filppula et al. (2009) investigated the entire corpus.
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.comThe progressive in Irish English 105 player in IrE. Leech (2004) went so far as to label stative verbs, no doubt jocularly, as
‘anti-progressive’ verbs. It is not the case that stative progressives in BrE don’t occur, or that much less use is made of them. On the contrary, when they do, they carry social or stylistic implications, as with attitudinal progressives formed by BE. Thus it is reconfirmed that, especially because of stative verbs, the progressive in IrE is used more frequently.15
Stative verbs have received central scrutiny in many attempts to explain the higher frequency of progressives in IrE.16 However, as the present chapter shows, stative progressives are only one of twenty categories which can account for progres- sive usage in IrE. Moreover, Leech et al. (2009: 130) do not consider stative progres- sives as significant for explaining the increase in progressive usage in their findings, despite the intuitive claims to that effect by Potter (1975) and Aitchison (1991) to which they allude.
4.6 WILL be V-ing progressive: Analysis (§3.11)
Table 2 shows that there are 122 occurrences of the WILL be V-ing construction in ICE-IRL, representing a frequency of 195 pmw.
Table 2. WILL be V-ing in ICE-IRL
Forms N
’ll be V-ing 71
will be V-ing 42
won’t be V-ing 7
will not be V-ing 2
Total 122 (195 pmw)
This compares with Filppula’s (2012: 95) frequency of 190 pmw. The grammati- calisation of the construction has led Celle & Smith (2010) to suggest that the WILL be V-ing construction is developing a more subjective and less aspectual type of meaning, which might help to explain its frequency increase, in EngE. Leech et al. (2009: 139) observe that the modal be V-ing construction has undergone “the most significant increase” in BrE in uses of the progressive, and that in particular WILL be V-ing “has
15. Cf. Ronan (2001), Filppula (2001, 2003, 2008), Filppula et al. (2008, 2009), Corrigan (2010), McCafferty & Amador-Moreno (2012a, 2012b), and Kallen (2013).
16. E.g. Ronan (2001), Filppula (2001, 2003, 2008), Filppula et al. (2008, 2009), Corrigan (2010), McCafferty & Amador-Moreno (2012a, 2012b), and Kallen (2013).
www.ebook777.com
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com
106 John M. Kirk
significantly increased out of the whole range of future expressions” (p. 139).17 This increase is quantified: for the modal progressive construction Leech et al. (2009: 295) claim an increase of 25.0% in general and a significant increase of 35% for the WILL progressive in particular.18
4.7 The modal progressive: Analysis (§3.12)
Early examples of modal progressives are provided in examples (62) and (63) below from CORIECOR:
(62) I am going to write him a letter he may Be [sic] looking for it.
(CORIECOR: Elizabeth Boardman, 18.06.1821) (63) I will I daresay be thinking of travelling northwards again.
(CORIECOR: Isabella Allen, 14.11.1838) For McCafferty and Amado-Moreno (2012a, 2012b), the CORIECOR data show that the frequency of modal progressives is very rare, with a pmw frequency of only 30 in the 1770s, rising to 100 in the 1830s. Nevertheless, modal progressives appear much more commonly today. McCafferty and Amado-Moreno (2012a) suggest they are innovations that have taken root only since the 1840s. Table 3 shows that there are 289 occurrences of the modal be V-ing construction in ICE-IRL (including WILL be V-ing), representing a frequency of 461 pmw.
Table 3. Modal be V-ing in ICE-IRL
Forms N
can be V-ing 6
can’t be V-ing 3
could be V-ing 9
couldn’t be V-ing
may be V-ing 9
may not be V-ing 1
might be V-ing 11
(Continued)
17. The frequency in FLOB is pmw 190 pmw (p. 295). Of the specific ‘matter of course’ use, there are 26 indisputable occurrences in LOB, and almost twice as many in FLOB, 45 (p. 296).
18. These percentages are from Leech et al.’s Table A6.14. The figure of 35% is revised with two examples fewer as a 39% increase in Table A6.16, and with three examples fewer as 41.3%
(Smith & Leech 2013: 88).
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.comThe progressive in Irish English 107
Forms N
must be V-ing 8
shall not be V-ing 1
should be V-ing 30
shouldn’t be V-ing 6
’ll be V-ing 71
will be V-ing 42
won’t be V-ing 7
will not be V-ing 2
’d be V-ing 33
would be V-ing 39
wouldn’t be V-ing 10
would not be V-ing 1
total 289 (461 pmw)
Table 4 shows that there are fifteen occurrences of the semi-modal be V-ing construction in ICE-IRL.
Table 4. Semi-modal be V-ing in ICE-IRL19
Semi-modal be V-ing N
BE to be V-ing 2
HAVE to be V-ing 3
NEED (to) be V-ing 2
ought to be V-ing 2
used (to) be V-ing 5
get to be V-ing 1
Total 15
19. This list of semi-modals is no more than indicative and isn’t exhaustive. In different studies, it is unclear which semi-modals are actually being counted. Quirk et al. (1985: 137) list a scale of verb types ranging from ‘central modals’ through ‘marginal modals’, ‘modal idioms’
to ‘semi-auxiliaries’ (many of which have modal meaning), ‘catenatives’ and final main verbs which take a nonfinite clause (e.g. begin and hope).
Table 3. (Continued)
www.ebook777.com
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.com
108 John M. Kirk
Typical examples of semi-modal progressives are:
(64) Okay so those for this afternoon and then uhm you need to be thinking about for next week okay what you’re going to do (ICE-IRL S1B-017) (65) Well you all actually ought to be thinking about it before Christmas anyway
quite frankly (ICE-IRL S1B-001)
The total number of modal and semi-modal progressives is 304 (or, 485 pmw), a lower figure than Filppula’s frequency of 560 pmw (2012: 96)20 and Filppula et al.’s (2008: 178) frequency of 530 pmw.21 The modal progressive is claimed to be more frequent in IrE than EngE (Kirk et al. 2008; Filppula et al. 2008, 2009, and Filppula 2012) but there are few comparative figures: Filppula (2012) states that the frequency in spoken ICE-GB is lower at 420 pmw. By contrast, I have calculated the equivalent pmw frequency for modals and semi-modals in the London-Lund Corpus to be only 25. Thus although the frequency of the modal progressive in IrE remains higher than EngE, the compari- sons between LLC and ICE-GB help to confirm the increases in the modal progressive reported by Leech et al. (2009) for BrE.
To sum up, modal progressives are increasing in both BrE and IrE, with a higher frequency remaining in IrE. However, it may well be that under greater contact with IrE speakers through immigration the modal (and specifically will) + progressive con- struction in BrE is increasing its frequency.
4.8 The extended-now progressive: Analysis (§3.14)
A further use of the progressive in IrE is as the extended-now perfect (or extended present tense), as in the following example from Henry (1957: 172): he’s workin’ these years on it. This construction has usually been viewed as an equivalent of a certain use of the perfective in standard English referring to an event or situation which began in the past, has continued unbrokenly up to the present, and is continuing (e.g. Harris 1993: 164; Filppula 1999: 122–128, 2008: 332–334; Siemund 2004: 67–96; Hickey 2007: 136; Filppula et al. 2008: 176–181; McCafferty & Amador-Moreno 2012a: 276–
277). Compare the example from ICE-IRL in (66) with the Irish vernacular equivalent composed by present author in (67).
(66) the two teenage girls have been missing since Saturday (ICE-IRL S2B-014) (67) the two teenage girls are missing since Saturday.
20. However, Filppula’s figure includes catenatives which are not specified.
21. This frequency is based on a combination data from the Northern Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech (Kirk 2004) and Filppula’s corpus of Traditional Irish English from several places in the Republic of Ireland (cf. Filppula 1999: 37–39).