Some observations on the semantics of the eighteenth-century progressiveaspectual and non-purely aspectual functions

Resumo

It is widely acknowledged that the English progressive expresses different meanings, which is contrary to the idea of monosemy that scholars such as Visser (1963-1973: §1806), proposes (cf. also Hirtle & Bégin 1990: 9). Among these meanings, not only do we find purely aspectual ones, such as duration, imperfectivity, dynamism and so on, but also so-called non-purely aspectual meanings or functions, which involve the more subjective expression of feelings and emotions. The aim of this paper is to analyse the eighteenth-century progressive from a semantic perspective. To this end, examples from The Century of Prose Corpus (COPC; British English, 1680-1780) and the eighteenth-century British English section of A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER, 1700-1799) will be examined. Special attention will be devoted to so-called non-purely aspectual functions, in particular to those cases in which the progressive occurs in combination with adverbials of the always-type.