The Use of the English Progressive Form in Discourse: An Analysis of a Corpus of Interview Data

The form and meaning of the English progressive have received a great deal of attention in linguistic and corpus-linguistic literature. The pragmatic/discourse uses of the progressive, however, are much less comprehensively understood from a corpus-linguistic perspective, largely because of the limitations of machine reading of discourse contexts. This paper uses a corpus-linguistic approach to categorizing and counting the distributions of some pragmatic functions for the English present and past progressive, replicating some, but challenging other, results of prior analyses of the progressive. Specifically, we address the use of the progressive in prompt/response sequences, in referring to co-text and its extent of agreement or disagreement with that co-text, in providing narrative background, and in interpreting prior discourse. We also provide several semantic features summarized through the corpus. The analyzed data comes from a corpus of 12.2 million words of spoken data—interviews from U.S. television and radio programs—and are selected via a systematic method. We finally discuss pedagogical and other implications.