Cover not available
Part of
Corpus Interrogation and Grammatical Patterns
Edited by Kristin Davidse, Caroline Gentens, Lobke Ghesquière and Lieven Vandelanotte
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 63] 2014
► pp. 57–80

The pattern to be a-hunting from Middle 
to Late Modern English

Towards extrapolating from Wright’s English 
Dialect Dictionary

| University of Innsbruck, Austria

The English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905), in its digitised beta-version EDD Online, allows for the retrieval of the gerund construction to be on verbing, generally in the reduced form to be a-verbing. The pattern was so much alive in the period covered by the EDD, 1700 to 1900, that its frequency can be hypothetically seen as an indicator of its role in the preceding centuries back to Late Middle English, even though evidence of its occurrence then has always been scarce. This paper’s extrapolation from Late Modern English back to Middle English is triggered by a striking similarity of distribution: to be a-verbing is documented by the EDD for all British regions except the English North, which is the very part where the participles of the progressive form to be verbing in Middle English had, according to Mossé (1925: 78), the deviant suffix –ande. My paper tries to explain this strange correlation, also throwing light on the competition from the progressive, which was the accepted form of the written standard, whereas to be a-verbing was the colloquial and dialectal variant.

Published online: 14 November 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.63.07mar
References
Åkerlund, A
1936/7 I go a-fishing. An historical and geographical sketch of the a-phrase in its active significance. Studia Neophilologica 9: 3–13. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bauer, G
1970 Studium zum System und Gebrauch der ‘Tempora’ in der Sprache Chaucers und Gowers. Wiener Beiträge zur Englischen Philologie 73. Wien: Braumüller. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bolinger, D
1971 The nominal in the progressive. Linguistic Inquiry 11: 246–250.Google Scholar
Braaten, B
1967 Notes on continuous tenses in English. Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprøgvidenskap 21: 167–180.Google Scholar
Brinton, L.J. & Akimoto, M
(eds) 1999 Collocational and Idiomatic Aspects of Composite Predicates in the History of English [Studies in Language Companion Series 47]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brunner, K
1962 Die Englische Sprache. Ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung, 2nd edn, 2 Vols. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Bybee, J., Perkins, R. & Pagliuca, W
1994 The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago IL: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Comrie, B
1976 Aspect. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Cottle, B
1969 The Triumph of English 1350–1400. London: Blandford Press.Google Scholar
Dal, I
1952 Zur Entstehung des englischen Participium praesentis auf –ing . Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprøgvidenskap 16: 5–116.Google Scholar
Denison, D
1993 English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. London: Longman.Google Scholar
1998 Syntax. In The Cambridge History of the English Language, S. Romaine (ed.), 92–329. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Dennis, L
1948 The progressive tense: frequency of its use in English. PMLA 55: 855–865. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
EDD Online
[URL][URL] (11 September 2012)
Elsness, J
1994 On the progression of the progressive in Early Modern English. ICAME Journal 18: 5–25.Google Scholar
Görlach, M
1999 English in Nineteenth-Century England. An Introduction. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gwosdek, H
2000 A checklist of English grammatical manuscripts and early printed grammars c. 1400–1540. The Henry Sweet Society Studies 6. Münster: Nodus Publikationen.
Hancyl, S
2008 Subjectivity and the progressive form in early eighteenth-century spoken discourse. Anglophonia: French Journal of English Studies 24: 197–218.Google Scholar
Hughes, A., Trudgill, P. & Watt, D
2005 English Accents and Dialects. An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of English in the British Isles. London: Hodder Arnold.Google Scholar
Jespersen, O
1909-49 A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Koch, P., & Österreicher, W
1996 Sprachwandel und expressive Mündlichkeit. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 102: 64–96.Google Scholar
Kranich, S
2009 Interpretative progressives in Late Modern English. In Current Issues in Late Modern English, I. Tieken-Boon van Ostade & W. van der Wurff (eds), 331–357. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
2010 The Progressive in Modern English. A Corpus-Based Study of Grammaticalization and Related Changes. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Labuhn, U
2001  Von give a laugh bis have a cry: Zu Aspektualität und Transitivität der V+N-Konstruktionen im Englischen. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M
1980 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Markus, M
1977 Tempus und Aspekt. Zur Funktion von Präsens, Präteritum und Perfekt im Englischen und Deutschen. Munich: Wilhelm Fink.Google Scholar
2007 Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary computerised: Towards a new source of information. In Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English: Towards Multimedia in Corpus Studies, P. Pahta, I. Taavitsainen, T. Nevalainen & J. Tyrrkö (eds). Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), University of Helsinki. [URL]Google Scholar
2008 Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary computerised: A platform for a new historical English dialect geography. In Historical Englishes in Varieties of Texts and Contexts: The Global COE Programme, International Conference 2007, M. Amano, M. Ogura & M. Ohkado (eds). Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Markus, M. & Heuberger, R
2007 The architecture of Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary: Preparing the computerised version. International Journal of Lexicography 20: 355–368. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Markus, M., Upton, C. & Heuberger, R
(eds) 2010 Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary and Beyond: Studies in Late Modern English Dialectology. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Mittendorf, I. & Poppe, E
2000 Celtic contacts of the English progressive. In The Celtic Englishes, H.L. Tristram (ed.), 117–145. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.Google Scholar
Mossé, F
1925 Le renouvellement de l’aspect en germanique, Mélanges Linguistiques Offerts à M.J. Venryes, 309–319.Google Scholar
1938 Histoire de la forme périphrastique être + participe présent en germanique, Vols. I-II. Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck.Google Scholar
1952 A Handbook of Middle English, trans. by James A. Walker. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins Press.Google Scholar
Nehls, D
1974 Synchron-diachrone Untersuchungen zur Expanded Form im Englischen. Eine struktural-funktioanle Analyse. München: Hueber.Google Scholar
Nickel, G
1966 Die expanded form im Altenglischen. Vorkommen; Funktion und Herkunft der Umschreibung beon/wesan, + Partizip Präsens [Kieler Beiträge zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 3]. Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz.Google Scholar
1974 Zur Entstehung der expanded form im Altenglischen. Schopf: 321–355. (= repr. of Nickel 1966: 268–).Google Scholar
Núñez Pertejo, P
1996 On the origin and history of the English prepositional type A-Hunting: A corpus-based study. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 9: 105–117.Google Scholar
2004 The Progressive in the History of English with Special Reference to the Early Modern English Period: A Corpus-based Study. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar
Römer, U
2005 Progressives, Patterns, Pedagogy. A Corpus-driven Approach to English Progressive forms, Functions, Contexts and Didactics [ Studies in Corpus Linguistics 18]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Salvi, G
2011 Morphosyntactic persistence. In The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages, M. Maiden, J.C. Smith & A. Ledgeway (eds), 318–381. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Scheffer, J
1975 The Progressive in English. Amsterdam: North Holland.Google Scholar
Schlüter, J
2005 Rhythmic Grammar. The Influence of Rhythm on Grammatical Variation and Change in English [Topics in English Linguistics 46]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schopf, A
(ed.) 1974 Der englische Aspekt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.Google Scholar
Smith, K.A
2007 The development of the English progressive. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 19: 205–241. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smitterberg, E
2005 The Progressive in 19th-Century English. A Process of Integration. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Strang, B
1982 Some aspects of the history of the be + ing construction. In Language Form and Linguistic Variation, Papers Dedicated to Angus McIntosh[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 15], J. Anderson (ed.), 427–474. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tajima, M
1985 The Syntactic Development of the Gerund in Middle English. Tokyo: Nan’un-do.Google Scholar
van der Gaaf, W
1930 Some notes on the history of the progressive form. Neophilologus 15: 1–215. (= repr. Schopf (ed.) 1974: 356–276) DOI logo
Visser, F.T
1963 An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Wischer, I
2006 Grammaticalisation and language contact in the history of English. The evolution of the progressive form. In Medieval English and its Heritage: Structure, Meaning and Mechanisms of Change. Papers given at the 13th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL), University of Vienna from 24 -28 August 2004, N. Ritt, H. Schendl, C. Dalton-Puffer & D. Kastovsky (eds), 165–187. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Wright, J
1898–1905. The English Dialect Dictionary. Oxford: Henry Frowde.Google Scholar
Ziegeler, D
2006 Interfaces with English Aspect. Diachronic and Empirical Studies [Studies in Language Companion Series 82]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Markus, Manfred
2019. EDD Online: What is new in its latest version 3.0. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 27:1 ► pp. 103 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.