Real and apparent time: the case of periphrastic DO and BE+ING

Arja Nurmi

Sat. 2:00-3:40 B

Periphrastic DO has been studied a great deal from Ellegard (1953) to Kroch (1989), but there still remains some unexplored territory. It has been suggested (e.g. Samuels 1972) that the developments of periphrastic DO and the BE + ing construction in Early Modern English (1500-1700) are interconnected. During the seventeenth century affirmative DO began to develop aspectual functions, which survive in the present day Somerset dialect, for example (Ihalainen 1976). These aspectual uses competed with the already better established form performing the same duties, the progressive construction using BE + ing.

In this paper I look at the rise and fall of periphrastic DO in affirmative statements and the gradual rise of BE + ing, observing the development in three subperiods (1520-1550, 1590-1620 and 1650-1680), comparing the changes in real time with the trends observable in apparent time.

The corpus used is the 1995 version of the Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence. The corpus consists of personal letters written between 1420 and 1680, and amounts presently to approximately 2 million words of running text.

References

Ellegard, Alvar. 1953. The Auxiliary Do. The Establishment and Regulation of it Use in English. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.

Ihalainen, Ossi. (1976) Periphrastic Do in Affirmative Sentences in the Dialect of East Somerset. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen LXXVII: 608-22.

Kroch, Anthony S. (1989) Function and Grammar in the History of English: Periphrastic do. In Fasold, Ralph W. and Deborah Schiffrin (eds.) Language Change and Variation, 133-172. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Nevalainen, Terttu and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. (1994) Sociolinguistics and Language History: The Helsinki Corpus of Early English Correspondence. In Hermes, Journal of Linguistics 13: 135-143.

Samuels, M.L. 1972. Linguistic Evolution with Special Reference to English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.