caa a22 4500 388058676 CHVBK 20180307125114.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199807 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0954394500001265 doi S0954394500001265 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0954394500001265 Arnaud René University of Paris (Paris VII-Denis Diderot) The development of the progressive in 19th century English: A quantitative survey [Elektronische Daten] [René Arnaud] The prodigious expansion of the progressive (be + ing periphrastic form, where be is at the same time the copula and a statement of existence) was a major feature of the modernization of the English verb system in the 19th century, when its frequency quadrupled. A survey (1787-1880) of the collections of private letters from 22 people, most of them famous writers, reveals that linguistic factors played a relatively small quantitative role in this development, whereas a clear correlation is found with two sociolinguistic factors: gender and intimacy. Frequencies are consistently higher for women than for men, and they increase with more intimate correspondents. Some parallels with biographical and literary data suggest that the Romantic vision, in a wide sense, may have contributed to the rise of this concrete, expressive, warmer existential form. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998 Language Variation and Change Cambridge University Press 10/2(1998-07), 123-152 0954-3945 10:2<123 1998 10 LVC https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394500001265 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394500001265 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Arnaud René University of Paris (Paris VII-Denis Diderot) NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Language Variation and Change Cambridge University Press 10/2(1998-07), 123-152 0954-3945 10:2<123 1998 10 LVC CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge