Quantifying Variation of the Expanded Form in English

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Didactics - English - Grammar, Style, Working Technique, grade: 3,0, University of Göttingen, 4 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The use of the Present/Past Progressive or as some people call it: ExpandedForm (EF)in English is part of the curriculum in schools and every students eithernative speaker of English or a learner of it as a foreign-language must learn thispart of English grammar.Next to German, where it is sometimes undefined when you do/did a specific taskit is specified in English by the progressive form. If you did something next toanother action happening you have to use the Progressive tense or if you aredoing something at the moment, like the reader of this term paper is reading at themoment.The topic of this term paper is the quantifying variation of the progressive tenseduring its development from Old English to Modern English. Therefore I will useworks by Nehls, Denison and Strang on that specific field and combine them intheir resources with Visser which is one of the richest sources of older English tofind out if there are differences or one expands.First, I am going to give a short summary of the work by the three authors.Second, I will give an overview over the source constructions of the ProgressiveForm (I will use the term 'Expanded Form as well as 'Progressive' because thecomposers switch between the two terms). In chapter three I will have a closerlook on the Modern use of the Expanded Form in English and in a fourth step I willcombine the old and modern usage of it to find out what was left or included duringthe years. In chapter five I will have a closer look on the mini-corpus-studies byMossè and Nickel, who dealt with the emergence of the progressive and showwhat changed since they started research on this field. And finally, I will draw aconclusion about the position of the Expanded Form.[...]