Defining grammatical constructions as a linguistic sign: The case …tania/CMGD/periphrasic... · 2008. 4. 14. · reinterpretation of the definition of the linguistic sign by Ferdinand

Folia Linguistica 41/1–2 (2007), 99–134. ISSN 0165–4004, E-ISSN 1614–7308 © Mouton de Gruyter – Societas Linguistica Europaea

Defining grammatical constructions as a linguistic sign: The case of periphrastic progressives in the Germanic languages1

Jeroen van Pottelberge Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders / Ghent University

In typological and contrastive investigations, constructions that designate similar categories of meaning in different languages are often assigned to the same grammatical category. In order for a linguistic investigation to be truly comparative, however, it is not enough for the constructions that are being compared to be mere translation equivalents: they must be identifiable as genuine grammatical constructions in the languages in question. This problem becomes particularly acute with periphrastic constructions, as on formal grounds they cannot always be easily distinguished from free syntactic combinations.

This article seeks to define periphrastic constructions on the basis of a renewed interpretation of Saussure’s (1916) theory of the linguistic sign. It is argued that in order for periphrastic grammatical constructions to constitute linguistic signs in their own right they must meet the same criteria as lexemes or morphemes, i.e. they must be combinations of a specific linguistic content with specific formal characteristics. This definition is applied to several constructions in the Germanic languages that have been treated as progressives in the literature; the empirical evidence shows that the status of some of them as linguistic signs, and hence as genuine grammatical constructions, is questionable.

Keywords: linguistic sign, periphrastic construction, progressive, Saussure, theory of grammar

1 I am grateful to Klaas Willems, Ludovic de Cuypere, Jürgen van de Walle and Truus de Wilde for stimulating conversations and helpful comments. I would also like to thank the editor of Folia Linguistica and two anonymous reviewers whose feedback helped to improve the article. Any mistakes that remain are my own.

100 Jeroen van Pottelberge

1. Introduction

In typological and comparative investigations, constructions in different languages that refer to the same concept and often serve as translation equivalents are frequently assigned to the same grammatical category. Bertinetto (2000: 561), for instance, classifies both the English progressive or expanded form (e.g. I am reading) and the French construction être en train de + infinitive (e.g. il est en train de lire ‘he is reading’) as instances of the verbal category PROGRESSIVE, as they both convey the idea of an event in progress. Working within a similar framework, Kuteva investigates the French construction il a failli tombé ‘he nearly fell’ and its translation equivalents in a broad language sample, and argues for the existence of an AVERTIVE as a cross-linguistic grammatical category (“a gram”) denoting that someone ‘was on the verge of V-ing but did not V’ (Kuteva 2002: 75–112; cf. also Kuteva 1998b, with minor differences). Current typological research offers numerous comparable examples. I do not intend to imply, of course, that typologists are unaware of the differences between the linguistic expressions they investigate, yet they often consider those differences to be largely the result of differing degrees of grammaticalization along a continuum, so that the expressions in question can still be regarded as essentially belonging to the same cross-linguistic category.

In what follows, I would like to argue that a more precise definition of PERIPHRASTIC GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTIONS can be arrived at. This more precise definition can help to distinguish between different types of expressions that are assumed to belong to the same cross-linguistic category, thus rendering cross-linguistic research less dependent on translation equivalents. Typological research, since it has no fixed set of criteria to determine what can be considered as a grammatical item in a given language, often takes translation equivalents as a starting point for the analysis, a procedure that has been criticized by Behrens (1999). Yet at the same time, both typology and contrastive linguistics insist that the expressions compared have to be “specialized morphosyntactic devices” (cf. Bertinetto et al. 2000: 520) in order to be included in the comparative investigation at all. Therefore, it seems crucial to clarify what is understood by a “grammatical construction” and in what ways it differs from contextually equivalent, yet free syntactic combinations.

As has often been noted (cf., for instance, Lehmann 1995[1982]: 135–136), periphrastic grammatical constructions pose a number of problems, as

Defining grammatical constructions as a linguistic sign 101

they consist of two or more separate words, just like free syntactic combinations; their status as linguistic units cannot simply be inferred, therefore, from their morphological features, as is the case with readily identifiable synthetic forms such as the preterite form in German or English. What needs to be demonstrated in the first place is, then, that a particular periphrastic construction is an independent linguistic entity at all. This can only be done by means of an intralinguistic analysis delimiting a periphrastic construction paradigmatically from other related structures in the same language (a point raised on several occasions by Coseriu, e.g. Coseriu 1987).

The question of what constitutes a grammatical construction is important not only for comparative and typological research; it is equally relevant to the description of the grammatical system of a single language. In this article, however, I will adopt a comparative perspective, because, first, this is the perspective adopted by much current research into grammatical categories, and, second, problems in distinguishing between grammatical constructions and free syntactic combinations become particularly acute when comparing different languages. The question will be investigated through the analysis of progressive constructions in the Germanic languages, with the label PROGRESSIVE CONSTRUCTION being understood as a periphrastic construction that expresses an event in progress or an ongoing action. The English progressive (I am reading) is perhaps the best-known example. However, the other Germanic languages also possess constructions that designate an event in progress, e.g. Dutch ik zit te lezen, German ich bin am Lesen, Swedish jag sitter och läser. Note that the common origin of the Germanic languages is irrelevant to this investigation, inasmuch as all these constructions constitute innovations that emerged long after the Germanic parent language had split.

The guiding principle underlying my analysis is the view that a periphrastic grammatical construction constitutes a linguistic sign, just like lexemes and morphemes, and combines, just like these, a specific linguistic form with a specific linguistic content. This view is based on a reinterpretation of the definition of the linguistic sign by Ferdinand de Saussure.2 Therefore, the discussion starts (cf. §2) with some preliminary

2 The nature, characteristics, and definition of the linguistic sign was an issue discussed extensively after World War I, not only in the field of linguistics proper, but also in Logical Positivism and from a psychological perspective. See Spang-Hanssen (1954) for an excellent overview of the various positions in this debate.


reflections on Saussure’s definition of the linguistic sign as put forward in the Cours de linguistique générale (henceforth CLG), and also in the manuscripts rediscovered in 1996 and edited in 2002 as Écrits de linguistique générale (henceforth ELG). Saussure was of course not the first or only one to analyse a linguistic sign as the association of a particular form with a particular meaning. The same intuition can already be found in the work of Aristotle (cf. Coseriu 2003: 71), and is at the core of Construction Grammar models (Goldberg 1995, Croft 2001). Croft (2001), for instance, defines constructions as “pairings of form and meaning that are at least partially arbitrary” (p. 18) and “language specific” (p. 6).3 More in particular, his concern, like that of much current typological research, is to define linguistic units in a way that makes them suitable for cross-linguistic investigations. An exhaustive discussion of Croft’s approach would require more space than is available here, but in §2.2 I will pinpoint some major differences between Saussure’s notion of linguistic sign and Croft’s, such differences having to do, basically, with the criteria they each use to delimit linguistic items: whereas Saussure defines both the form and meaning of a given linguistic sign relative to the form and meaning of other linguistic signs in the same language, Croft embraces a model in which a SEMANTIC MAP of language-particular categories is “mapped onto a CONCEPTUAL SPACE, much of whose structure is hypothesized to be universal” (Croft 2001: 8). It will be shown here, however, that even in the context of cross-linguistic investigations grammatical contructions must first be identified through a contrastive analysis of related constructions carried out within a single language.

The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 outlines Saussure’s approach to the linguistic sign. Section 3 examines in detail a number of periphrastic constructions in Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages which have, at various times, been interpreted as progressive markers and tries to determine their exact status in the languages in question. Section 4 offers some concluding remarks.

3 In fact, this is Croft’s definition of CONSTRUCTIONS, but since he regards all linguistic items (ranging from morphemes and lexemes to syntax and collocations) as constructions (Croft 2001: 16–17), the term “construction” largely coincides with “linguistic sign”.


2. Definition of the linguistic sign

2.1. Preliminaries As is well known, Saussure considers the linguistic sign (“le signe linguistique”) as a two-sided entity (“une entité psychique à deux faces”, CLG: 99), one side being “le concept” or meaning, the other “l’image acoustique” or sound pattern. As Saussure himself acknowledges, the observation that a linguistic sign is made up of some kind of meaning attached to a sound pattern is trivial (“tout à fait banale”, ELG: 20). However, the implications of the sound-meaning association are far-reaching and important in the process of delimiting linguistic signs.

The first important consequence is that NEITHER A CONCEPT NOR A FORM, but only their mutual association, constitutes a linguistic sign. Saussure often comes back to this fundamental point in his linguistic thought (e.g. ELG: 44 and 93). When either form or meaning is dropped, the linguistic unit vanishes altogether: “dès qu’on ne retient qu’un de ces éléments, [l’entité linguistique] s’évanouit” (CLG: 144). Saussure described this inseparable association of form and meaning with his famous metaphor of the two sides of a sheet of paper: “une feuille de papier: la pensée est le recto et le son le verso” (CLG: 157).4

Secondly, both sides of this sheet of paper are as different as can be imagined: one is simply physical sound (or, more exactly, the psychological counterpart of the sound), while the other belongs, just like all concepts and ideas, to the realm of human consciousness. This implies, therefore, that the linguistic sign as a research object is NOT AVAILABLE FROM THE OUTSET: “la langue présente donc ce caractère étrange et frappant de ne pas offrir d’entités perceptibles de prime abord” (CLG: 149; cf. also ELG: 19–20).5 The observer has to CREATE the linguistic research object by establishing a form-

4 ‘Thought is one side of the sheet and sound the reverse side’ (Harris 1983: 111). Cf. also Waugh (1984: 94): “it is the bond between signans and signatum which creates both the signans and the signatum and, perforce, the sign as a whole”. The idea that the association of a form with a content creates a linguistic sign (and makes a form a linguistic form and a content a linguistic content) is the basic credo of the European structuralist tradition, cf. also Hjelmslev (1971[1943]: 66–67). 5 ‘A language thus has this curious and striking feature. It has no immediately perceptible entities’ (Harris 1983: 105).


meaning association. As Saussure pointed out, because of the greatly diverse nature of these two components, the task of stating what exactly a linguistic sign is seems absurd (“une tâche absurde”), as if one were asked to determine what kind of odd species the compound of a horse and an iron plate represents (ELG: 18). According to Saussure, the linguist cannot solve this problem by first classifying the ideas and then looking at the linguistic structures that may or may not express them, or vice versa: “dans les deux cas [le linguiste] méconnaît ce qui constitue l’objet formel de son étude et de ses classifications, à savoir exclusivement le point de jonction des deux domaines” (ELG: 18).6 The association of a form with a content is purely mental, which means that the reality of a linguistic sign is to be found in human consciousness (“la conscience que nous en avons, ou que nous voulons bien en prendre à chaque moment”, ELG: 83). As a consequence, the question of what can be considered a linguistic sign is not an empirical question, but a theoretical one. Empirically, there are only utterances, i.e. individual acts of speakers who use sound patterns to refer to a specific piece of reality. Yet neither the observed sound patterns nor the different entities they refer to can by themselves determine whether two utterances are instances of the same linguistic form or not; on the one hand, two identical sound patterns can be homonyms, referring systematically to a different entity, and, on the other, one and the same entity can be referred to by different sound patterns (e.g. she and the queen). Not even the sound pattern of an utterance and its reference taken together can serve as a useful criterion, as one single sound pattern can refer to different objects all the time (e.g. the word house usually refers to a different house every time it is used) and, in turn, a given sound pattern is never exactly the same each time it is reproduced (even though the variations of delivery and intonation are often insignificant). These elusive characteristics of the linguistic sign are discussed in detail by Mulder & Hervey (1972: 36–53).

Thirdly, the association of form and content means that the definition of a linguistic sign, in fact, CONSISTS OF TWO DEFINITIONS, as both terms of the association need to be defined: a form only “exists” as a linguistic form when it corresponds to a linguistic content (i.e. to a meaning). Conversely, a content only exists as a linguistic meaning when it is attached to a linguistic form. It is impossible to delimit either of the two components prior to the

6 ‘in either case [the linguist] ignores that which technically constitutes the object of study and classification, namely the interface of the two domains’ [trans.– JVP].


other: “il n’y a d’autre détermination que celle de l’idée par la forme et celle de la forme par l’idée” (ELG: 39). The formal side of a linguistic entity cannot be defined without knowing its meaning, but on the other hand, determining the meaning requires a definition of the corresponding formal structure. From a practical point of view, delimiting a linguistic sign thus seems to present almost insurmountable difficulties.

2.2. Delimiting the linguistic sign So far, the Saussurean definition of the linguistic sign seems to be largely compatible with Croft’s (2001) definition of CONSTRUCTION, as both agree that a linguistic entity always consists of a form-meaning pairing which is basically language-specific. They diverge in several important ways, however. First, as noted above, Saussure is much more explicit about the fact that, in order to delimit a linguistic sign, two definitions are needed: a definition of the form and another one of the content. Second, and more importantly, for Croft, as for similar typologically-oriented SEMANTIC MAP models (cf., among others, van der Auwera & Plungian 1998, Croft 2001, 2003[1990]: 133–139, Haspelmath 2003), crucial to the delimitation of linguistic items is the notion of a language-universal CONCEPTUAL SPACE, a “structured representation of functional structures” (Croft 2001: 93), where “functional” refers to values externally defined (Croft: 2003[1990]: 134), i.e. “outside the syntactic, morphological and phonological structure of the language itself” (ibid: 14). The conceptual space constrains possible distribution patterns for the relevant LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC constructions and categories. Of course, the extra-linguistic world constitutes an essential tertium comparationis in every linguistic theory, particularly in cross-linguistic research. But in the Saussurean notion of linguistic sign the extra-linguistic world (of objects and states of affairs referred to by linguistic expressions) is not the only tertium comparationis. Other linguistic signs of the same language, which are similar in form and/or meaning, are at least as important as a point of reference. This is what is implied by Saussure’s concept of VALUE (Fr. valeur), to which I will return below. In fact, in order to find out whether an expression constitutes an independent linguistic sign at all, a contrastive analysis with comparable linguistic signs in the same language is indispensable.

Following Saussure, a specific linguistic sign, e.g. the progressive in one of the Germanic languages, cannot be delimited simply by checking which expressions are used to refer to a “progressive” state of affairs or an “ongoing


action”, as reference to an ongoing action in itself does not imply that the linguistic structure in question is necessarily associated with ongoing action as its linguistic (i.e. grammatical) meaning. For instance, both the adjective blunt and the phrase not sharp can be applied to the same thing, but only the adjective blunt counts as a linguistic unit (in this case a lexeme), whereas not sharp is considered to be the connection of two units, viz. not and sharp. Conversely, a difference in form does not necessarily imply the existence of an independent linguistic entity. Saussure illustrates (CLG: 147) this point with French mois ‘month’. Depending on the initial sound of the next word, the noun is pronounced [mwa] (e.g. le mois de décembre ‘the month of December’) or [mwaz] (e.g. un mois après ‘one month later’), but this formal difference does not correspond to a difference in meaning, and therefore we are not dealing with different linguistic signs. This kind of alternation is known as allomorphy, where the variation is conditioned by the phonetic or phonological properties of the surrounding sounds and has nothing to do with semantics. According to Saussure, linguistic investigations do not start from linguistic data, but from points of view, from which linguistic signs are then “created”. In linguistics, he argues,

il y a d’abord des points de vue, justes ou faux, mais uniquement des points de vue à l’aide desquels on CRÉE secondairement les choses. Ces créations se trouvent correspondre à des réalités quand le point de départ est juste, ou n’y pas correspondre dans le cas contraire. (ELG: 200, emphasis in original)7

In their Theory of the linguistic sign, Mulder & Hervey (1972: 42) express the same idea as follows: “sign-identity, i.e. equivalence of utterances, cannot, in

7 ‘there are, first of all, different points of view, which may be correct or mistaken, but only points of view, by means of which one subsequently CREATES the data. These creations turn out to correspond to actual reality when the starting point is correct, or not to correspond, when it is incorrect’ [trans.– JVP]. Contrary to other quotations from the Écrits, this is already present in the critical edition of the Cours by Engler (Saussure 1968–1974[1916]: 26). Basically the same idea can be found in the following famous quote from the Bally & Sechehaye version of the Cours (CLG: 23): “Bien loin que l’objet précède le point de vue, on dirait que c’est le point de vue qui crée l’objet” [‘The object is not given in advance of the viewpoint: far from it. Rather, one might say that it is the viewpoint adopted which creates the object’ (Harris 1983: 8)].


any description of a language, be proved in a positive sense”. Defining a linguistic sign boils down to determining which utterances are equivalent realizations or instantiations of the same linguistic sign. As a consequence, each linguistic sign is, strictly speaking, a hypothesis that should be tested: “It [i.e. the equivalence of utterances] can only be set up as a hypothesis in the description, and at best, demonstrated via the refutation of all possible alternative hypotheses, or refuted by confrontation with the data to which it is meant to apply” (ibid).

Mulder & Hervey introduce, therefore, the useful concept of a TENTATIVE

SIGN, i.e. the assumption of sign-identity or equivalence of utterances, which means that a series of utterances belongs to the same sign. The hypothetical sign-identity is valid only because alternative hypotheses do not yield an acceptable description of the data.8

Delimiting a linguistic sign in isolation from the others is not only impossible, it also misses the point that all signs function as part of a system of various signs. Saussure thus introduces the concept of value, which is an entity’s relative value or position within the system of signs (CLG: 155–169). A sign’s value consists of relations with and differences from similar or related entities. This concerns both the form and the content level : “la langue consiste, non dans un système de valeurs absolues ou positives, mais dans un système de valeurs relatives et négatives, n’ayant d’existence que par l’effet de leur opposition” (ELG: 80).9 In other words, a linguistic sign consists essentially of differences of form and meaning, i.e. its form and meaning differ from the form and meaning of other signs in the same language.

It deserves to be pointed out that differences in linguistic form can relate not only to phonology and morphology, but also to syntax. Linguistic units often derive some of their crucial characteristics from syntactic properties. For instance, differences in distribution and combinatory possibilities can serve to distinguish between entities that are phonologically and morphologically identical. Thus, in French the absence of a direct object

8 This procedure parallels the activity of the speaker-hearer, who also assigns utterances to linguistic signs (although intuitively) and progresses from utterances to linguistic entities and their meanings, and from there to the meaning of the text itself. 9 ‘Language does not consist of a system of absolute or positive values, but rather of a system of relative and negative values, which exist only by virtue of their opposition’ [trans.– JVP].


distinguishes the auxiliary verb avoir from the lexical verb avoir ‘to possess’, with which an object is obligatory.

The concept of value is also crucial to delimit the meaning of a linguistic sign: “Dans l’intérieur d’une même langue, tous les mots qui expriment des idées voisines se limitent réciproquement” (CLG: 160).10 Saussure gives several examples to illustrate this. In French, each of a set of synonyms like redouter ‘to dread’, craindre ‘to fear’, and avoir peur ‘to be afraid’ has its specific value in the system only because they stand in contrast with one another. The importance of the value notion is also noticeable in the comparison of the present tense in Proto-Germanic and Latin. Proto-Germanic used the present tense to express both present and future actions or states of affairs, as it had no separate verb form for the future; therefore the Proto-Germanic present tense had a different value from the Latin present tense, as the Latin verb does have future tense forms in addition to present tense forms (CLG: 162). We could complete Saussure’s example by adding that, as a result, the meaning of the Latin present tense should be defined as ‘present’, whereas the Proto-Germanic present tense is best described as ‘non-past’. Delimiting the meaning of grammatical, as opposed to lexical, items is further complicated by the fact that most grammatical items do not have a clear conceptual meaning. So when trying to determine the meaning of a grammatical construction it is essential, as will become clear in §3.1, to abstract away from the semantic specifications it may acquire in a given context (cf. Coseriu 1987: 7). 2.3. Delimiting periphrastic grammatical constructions To a large extent, Saussure’s definition of the linguistic sign is based on the word as prototypical unit of grammatical description (cf. CLG: 97–103, 144–169). However, when discussing the delimitation of the concrete entities or units of language (“entités délimitées” or “unités”), Saussure remarks that there are units larger than single words (“il y a des unités plus larges que les mots”, CLG: 148), and adduces as an example the periphrastic construction il a été ‘he has been’, that is, the French perfect, going on to add that it is extremely difficult to unravel the arrangement of units present and to say

10 ‘In a given language, all the words which express neighbouring ideas help define one another’s meaning’ (Harris 1983: 114).


which are the concrete elements the language is using (“il est extrêmement difficile de débrouiller dans une chaîne phonique le jeu des unités qui s’y rencontrent et de dire sur quels éléments concrets une langue opère”, CLG: 148). Saussure does not attempt to characterize the periphrastic sign any further, perhaps assuming that the properties of the linguistic sign he established by investigating the word can be applied to periphrastic entities just as well. Yet the delimitation of the periphrastic sign seems to raise special problems in view of the fact that its constituents are words that occur outside the periphrastic construction as well, so that from a phonological and morphological point of view there is no difference between periphrastic constructions and free syntactic combinations.

In the remainder of this paper I will try to extend Saussure’s definition of the linguistic sign to include periphrastic grammatical constructions, and will use progressive expressions in the Germanic languages as an example. It will be argued here that, in the absence of distinctive phonological and morphological features, the status of a periphrastic construction as an independent linguistic sign depends on the COMBINATORIAL (i.e. SYNTACTIC)

PROPERTIES of its components and their ability to convey a specific meaning. As far as progressives are concerned, the meaning in question must be ‘event in progress, ongoing action’. Our empirical analyses will show that there exist substantial differences between, for instance, the English progressive and other constructions usually treated as progressives in the relevant literature.

3. Progressives in the Germanic languages

Not uncommonly, typological investigations make little difference between genuine progressive constructions and other, less grammaticalized constructions also capable, under certain circumstances, of expressing progressive meaning. Thus Hewson (1997: 340) argues that all modern Germanic languages “show a variety of periphrastic forms for expressing Progressive aspect” which have developed to supplement the verbal system inherited from Proto-Germanic. According to Hewson, the inherited Germanic tense system, with only a present and a preterite, could only express accomplished (perfective) events, leaving a gap as far as the encoding


of imperfective events was concerned (Hewson 1997: 348; cf. Thieroff 1999 for a critical review).11

In a contrastive analysis that was part of the EUROTYP project, Karen Ebert drew up a list of progressive markers in the modern Germanic languages (excluding English), based on questionnaires where informants were asked to translate English sentences containing a verb in the progressive into their mother tongue. From her list (cf. Ebert 2000: 607 for a synoptic presentation) the reader would have to conclude that all Germanic languages have progressives, and most of them more than one, even though Ebert rightly points out that none of them is “grammaticalized to the same extent as in English” (ibid: 605). Her analysis discusses features such as combinability with tense and voice and with specific verb types, semantic and pragmatic conditions, temporal conditions, etc. Undoubtedly, all of the constructions in Ebert’s list can refer to an event in progress, at least in some contexts, and comparing translation equivalents is a legitimate enterprise. However, in the case studies below I would like to pick up on some of the progressive constructions examined by Ebert and other authors and show that, on a closer look, they not only differ with regard to the features mentioned above (which is uncontroversial), but also with regard to their status as genuine grammatical constructions, and thus as linguistic signs, as these have been defined above. Some expressions are not progressive constructions at all, but rather free syntactic combinations that can refer to events in progress in certain contexts (§3.1). Other expressions come closer to being grammaticalized progressives, but cannot yet be considered as such (§3.2). Finally, truly progressive constructions (§3.3) do not constitute a homogeneous class but rather fall into two different subtypes: one that is paradigmatically integrated and one that is not. 3.1. Constructions that can refer to events in progress If one looks for ways to express the content ‘event in progress’ in the Germanic languages, it is obvious that there is a whole range of possibilities

11 A counter-argument to Hewson’s account is the fact that most Romance languages also developed progressives (cf. Bertinetto et al. 2000) without there being a gap in the verbal system of their parent language. In my opinion, the very question of WHY the Germanic languages developed progressives at all is pointless and will not be investigated in this paper.


to do so. For instance, the German adverb gerade (which could be translated as ‘just’) is interpreted as a progressive marker by Dahl (1985: 166) and recommended as a translation equivalent for the English progressive by Königs (1995: 153). Moreover, gerade meets the test used by Bertinetto et al. (2000: 517–518) in their typological questionnaire to establish whether a language has a dedicated progressive form or not, namely the ability to occur as an answer to the question in (1), but not as an answer to the question “What does Ann do every Saturday morning?” Indeed, the attested example in (2) refers in an explicit and unambiguous manner to an event in progress:

(1) [Somebody on the phone wants to know about Ann, who is next to me.] Sie arbeitet gerade. ‘She is working [right now].’ (2) Deine CD ist heute bei mir eingetroffen, sie läuft gerade.

your CD is today with me arrived, she plays just ‘Your CD arrived today, it is just playing.’

(Google) However, this does not mean that gerade + verb is a progressive construction. For, as already pointed out by Ebert (2000: 631–632; see also Bertinetto 2000: 553, footnote 15), gerade does not refer systematically (in all contexts) to an event in progress and can in fact combine with other tenses and aspects. Cf. (3), where it refers to a momentary event:

(3) Er hat gerade aufgehört. ‘He has just stopped.’

Yet, as was the case in (2), in (3) gerade modifies the main verb (aufhören ‘to stop’). This suggests that gerade in (2) only refers to an event in progress because of the present tense and the lexical meaning of the verb laufen (literally ‘to walk’, but here used in the sense of ‘to turn’ or ‘to play’), which, contrary to aufhören, designates an event with a certain duration. So what is crucial is the context, namely the inherent meaning of the verb and the tense markers.

Apart from gerade + verb, there are several other constructions in German that can express an ongoing action:


(4) Er arbeitet i-m Moment. he works in-the moment ‘He is working at the moment.’

(5) Er ist mit der Arbeit beschäftigt. he is with the work busy ‘He is busy working.’

(6) Er arbeitete, als ich hereinkam. he worked when I entered ‘He was working when I came in.’

As the translations show, English would require the progressive form in all of the above examples. In certain contexts, German can even use the simple present on its own, without any adverbial modification, to refer to an ongoing action, e.g. Er arbeitet can be an answer to the question Was macht er jetzt? (A: ‘What is he doing right now?’ / B: ‘He is working’). Moreover, these expressions are used relatively rarely to designate an ongoing action, other functions being more salient, such as the stressing of the momentary character of the action in (2) and (4), an activity or occupation in (5) and simultaneity in (6). It thus follows that the requirement that the notion ‘event in progress’ be associated with particular formal properties seems essential, as otherwise the number of progressive markers in a given language could be multiplied almost indefinitely. To conclude, constructions like those quoted above cannot be considered progressive markers. 3.2. Constructions approaching grammaticalized progressives Apart from constructions such as those discussed in §3.1, there also exist constructions in the Germanic languages frequently, or almost exclusively, used to denote ongoing actions, and which are therefore classified by many authors as progressive markers. On a closer look, however, they can be shown to still lack distinctive formal properties, so that they should rather be seen as special uses of constructions not necessarily aspectual in function.


3.2.1. Dutch bezig zijn + infinitival clause with (om) te The Dutch construction bezig zijn (lit. ‘to be busy’) often occurs in combination with an infinitival clause introduced by the infinitive particle te:12

(7) Het waterschap is bezig te onderzoeken of bestrijdingsmiddelen in het water terechtkomen. ‘The polder authorities are examining whether pesticides pollute the water.’ (www.waterbodem.nl/waterbodem-nieuws_detail.php)

(8) Men is nu vooral bezig om te onderzoeken hoe binnen de werkgroep kan worden samengewerkt op het gebied van de collectievorming.13 ‘At the moment, we are investigating how the workgroup can cooperate in developing our collection.’ (www.kb.nl/ infolev/ BMI/ biomeditaties/ bm39/ verslag.html)

Because of the literal meaning of bezig zijn, the implication in examples such as (7)–(8) is that one ‘is busy doing something’ and that an action is going on. This explains why many reference grammars and research papers simply classify the construction as a progressive marker; cf. Vismans (1983: 378–379), Donaldson (1997: 194), Ebert (2000: 607) and Klooster (2001: 62). However, contrary to what is usually suggested in the literature, the construction bezig zijn + infinitival clause does not seem to qualify as a grammaticalized progressive with distinctive formal properties. First, the adjective bezig can only be used predicatively,14 and, like other Dutch adjectives in predicative function, it can be followed by an infinitive clause. Witness bereid ‘prepared’ and vrij ‘free’ in the following examples:

(9) Hij is bereid de zaak te onderzoeken. ‘He is prepared to investigate the case.’

(10) Hij is vrij (om) te onderzoeken wat de gevolgen zijn. ‘He is free to investigate the consequences.’

12 The infinitival clause can also be introduced by om te, as a result of a general tendency to replace te by om te in Dutch final infinitival clauses. 13 For the sake of clarity, in some of the longer examples the construction under investigation is underlined. 14 Attributive use occurs only in the expression een bezige bij ‘an industrious person’.


Secondly, and more importantly, bezig zijn can also occur without any type of complementation (e.g. ze zijn bezig ‘they are busy’, ‘they are working on it’), or followed by a prepositional phrase introduced by met or aan; the meaning of the adjective is then the same as when it governs an infinitival clause. In other words, it means ‘busy’, and only secondarily ‘event in progress’; witness (11)–(12):

(11) Google is bezig met een gratis emaildienst. ‘Google is working on a free e-mail service.’ (lit. ‘Google is busy on a free e-mail service.’) (ronni.web-log.nl)

(12) Samen zijn ze momenteel bezig aan een maquette van het decor. ‘At the moment, they are working on a model of the scenery.’ (lit. ‘they are busy on a model of the scenery.’) (www.lombox. nl/Kunst/poortvanlombok.html)

Despite the above generalizations, it has to be acknowledged that a tendency can be detected in Modern Dutch, and especially in colloquial speech, for the construction bezig zijn + infinitival clause to increasingly allow for a wider range of nominal phrases to fill the subject slot. In other words, bezig zijn ‘to be busy’ normally requires an agentive or animate subject, but sometimes bezig zijn + (om) te infinitival clause occurs as well with non-agentive and even inanimate subjects, and with verbs in the infinitival clause that do not require an agent, such as verdwijnen ‘to disappear’ (13) and zakken ‘to sink’ (14):

(13) Het platteland is bezig te verdwijnen. ‘The countryside is disappearing.’ (www.larenstein.nl/ homepage/ index.cfm?id=738)

(14) De dijkdoorbraken in Wilnis en bij Rotterdam van afgelopen maand zijn symbolisch. Nederland is bezig door de bodem te zakken. ‘The dike breaches at Wilnis and near Rotterdam last month are symptomatic. The Netherlands are sinking through the surface.’ (www.roeljanssen.nl/ columns/ 030918.htm)

These examples violate the semantic restriction that bezig zijn can only select for an agentive or animate subject. A corollary of this is that the idea of the subject entity ‘being busy’ is absent, so that the focus is only on an event in progress. To some extent, a similar tendency can also be observed with the


simple bezig zijn construction (i.e. not followed by an infinitival clause), but in this case the non-agentive subjects are semantically more specific and refer to a process or a period of time:

(15) Maar welke variant een regisseur ook kiest, een film is bezig vanaf het eerste beeld. ‘But whatever variant a director chooses, a film is playing from the first picture.’ (http://www.kfa-filmbeschouwing.nl/printversies%20filmbesprekingen/ do_the_right_thing. pdf)

(16) Het regenseizoen is bezig dus dat betekent veel regen in nachts [sic] en af en toe in de ochtend. ‘It is the rainy season now, so this means a lot of rain at night and sometimes in the morning.’ (www.barryvanhelden.nl/ paginas/sub/verhaal/main.php)

To sum up, in view of the data reviewed above and of examples such as (11)–(12), there do not seem to be enough grounds to consider the construction bezig zijn + infinitival clause as a progressive marker. However, insofar as this sequence is undergoing an expansion in the range of possible subjects traditionally available with bezig zijn, it is gradually coming closer to becoming a distinctive construction.15 3.2.2. Swedish constructions with postural verbs This section will be concerned with Swedish constructions like han sitter och läser (lit. ‘he sits and reads’). They consist of two verbs sharing the same subject, the first verb being a POSTURAL VERB (sitta ‘sit’, stå ‘stand’ or ligga ‘lie’), and the second a verb which expresses the main action in the construction. Both verbs are connected by the conjunction och ‘and’, and on the surface such constructions look like two coordinated clauses. Similar structures can be found in Danish (e.g. han sidder og læser) and Norwegian (e.g. han sitter og leser).

Postural verb constructions often refer to an event in progress and can, in many instances, be used to translate an English progressive (e.g. he is reading)

15 A similar development is attested with the English progressive, which until about the eighteenth century was restricted to human or human-like subjects, and to only certain verbs (cf. Denison 1998: 145).


or a Dutch postural verb construction (e.g. hij zit te lezen ‘he sits reading’, ‘he is reading’). Both typological research and contrastive grammars generally regard these Scandinavian constructions as grammaticalized progressive markers (cf. Dahl 1995, Kuteva 1998a, 1999, Tonne 1999: 134, 2001, Ebert 2000: 617–624). Yet a detailed comparison of postural verb constructions with other related structures in the Scandinavian languages will show that most of their formal properties are in fact also shared by a much broader set of constructions, namely the so-called PSEUDO-COORDINATION constructions, which in many cases lack any progressive meaning. The account that follows, though restricted to Swedish for reasons of space, applies equally to Danish and Norwegian. 3.2.2.1. Postural verb constructions and pseudo-coordination There is no doubt that constructions like han sitter och läser ‘he sits and reads’ behave atypically when compared to ordinary Swedish coordinations. Most salient are the scope of the negative particle inte ‘not’, and the fact that it is not repeated in the second coordinate. As a general rule, a negative particle in the first clause of a Swedish coordinate sentence negates the verb in the first clause, but not the verb in the second, even in cases where both verbs share the same subject and this is ellided in the second clause (as is clear from the translation, the same rule holds for English):

(17) Jimmy svarar inte och byter snabbt samtalsämne. Jimmy answers not and switches quickly subject ‘Jimmy does not answer and quickly changes the subject.’ (www.kanal5.se)

Turning now to negation in a postural verb construction, we notice, in contrast, that the negative particle negates both coordinate verbs:

(18) Vi sitter inte och fnissar. Vi lyssnar. we sit not and giggle we listen ‘We are not sitting around and giggling. We are listening.’ (www.iuf.se/ strangnas.htm)

Unlike in (17), the negative particle in (18) has scope over both verbs in the coordination (i.e. the meaning is that ‘we are neither sitting nor giggling’), which shows that the postural verb in the first clause (sitta ‘to sit’) and the


verb expressing the event in the second clause (fnissa ‘to giggle’) constitute a single linguistic unit that can be negated by the same negative particle; the same holds true for postural verb constructions with ligga ‘lie’ and stå ‘stand’.

Coordinate constructions where the negative particle has scope over the whole sentence should therefore be regarded as a different kind of grammatical construction which only on the surface looks like a coordinate sentence. A frequent label in the literature is PSEUDO-COORDINATION; see Johannessen (1998: 48–51), Tonne (1999: 133–137), Lødrup (2002), and de Vos (2004), who argues that there are grounds for not regarding pseudo-coordination as a kind of subordination. Other useful discussions of the construction can be found in Andersson (1979) and Teleman et al.’s Svenska Akademiens grammatik (1999: Chapter 42, §§17–22 ‘Pseudosamordning’).16

Pseudo-coordination is attested in many languages, and with many different functions (cf. Faarlund & Trudgill 1999, Myre Jørgensen 2003). As regards the Scandinavian languages, it deserves mention that the wide scope of the negative particle noted in connection with example (18) above is not limited to pseudo-coordinations involving postural verbs, but can rather be found in many other sequences consisting of two finite verbs coordinated by och ‘and’ and linked by a PURPOSIVE relation. Witness the following examples:

(19) Jag talar klarspråk och springer inte och gömmer mig när det blåser. ‘I speak openly and don’t run away and hide when I get criticized.’ (www.almhult.com/frida/frida.htm)

(20) Skriv upp i din almanacka datumet för aktiviteten. Vi ringer inte och påminner dig. ‘Write the appointment down in your agenda. We won’t call to remind you.’ (www.chapters swea.org/uk/program.htm)

(21) Han hycklar inte och säger att han jagar älg för att komma ut och få frisk luft. Då kan man ta en skogspromenad. ‘He doesn’t play the hypocrite by saying that he hunts deer in order to get some fresh air. In that case you could just as well take a walk in the woods.’ (www3. techsell.se/aip /smpage.fwx)

16 For analyses of pseudo-coordination in the Scandinavian languages from the perspective of generative grammar, in particular Lexical Functional Grammar, see the references in Lødrup (2002).


(22) Ett annat råd är[:] titta inte och “klanka” ner på de som blir gravida trots deras ål[d]er. ‘Some further advice would be: don’t watch girls who get pregnant in spite of their age just to grumble [= klanka] about them.’ (www. villhabarn. com/villhabarn/debatt12.html)

In these sentences, the verbs in the pseudo-coordination form a semantic unit, as the first action is performed in order to bring about the second. It is also clear that inte negates both verbs, even though it only occurs after the first. Yet the verbs in the first coordinate (springa ‘to run’, ringa ‘to call’, hyckla ‘to feign’, and titta ‘to look’) do not qualify as postural verbs, and the overall construction does not convey progressive meaning.

Apart from the wide scope of the negative particle, another feature of Swedish pseudo-coordinations which has attracted considerable attention is the position of the subject in interrogative sentences, relative to the two coordinated verbs. Thus Tonne (1999), following Andersson (1979: 6), notes that in ordinary coordination, when two verbs share the same subject, this is overt only in the second coordinate, but remains implicit in the first:

(23) Röker och super Pelle? smokes and boozes Pelle ‘Does Pelle smoke and booze?’

By contrast, in postural verb constructions the subject is overt in the first coordinate and implicit in the second:

(24) Sitter Pelle och röker? sits Pelle and smokes ‘Is Pelle sitting and smoking?’

This is interpreted by Tonne (1999: 134) as evidence that the Scandinavian postural verb construction has partly grammaticalized into a progressive marker. Yet she overlooks the fact that the pattern of subject ellision illustrated in (24) is a feature of pseudo-coordination in general, whether involving postural verbs or verbs belonging to other semantic classes. Cf. (25), with the verb läsa ‘to read’ and (26), with vänta ‘to wait’; note once more the purposive relation holding between both events:


(25) Läser du och försöker förstå felförklaringen?

‘Do you read [it] in order to try to understand this wrong explanation?’ (www.d.kth.se/d95-kha/thesis/Videoband8.htm)

(26) Väntar du och köper resan i sista minuten för att göra ett klipp? ‘Do you wait to book your travel till the last moment to get a bargain?’ (www.aftonbladet.Se/resor/ 9906/20/sistamin.html)

To summarize, pseudo-coordination in the Scandinavian languages has

been investigated rather unsystematically, and without paying due attention to empirical data. All too often researchers have tended to concentrate on just one subtype of pseudo-coordination, namely the subtype involving postural verbs; see for instance Johannessen (1998: 47–51), Tonne (1999), and Ragnarsdóttir et al. (2000); also partly Thorell (1987[1977]:190), and Kortteinen (2000).17 This probably explains why the purposive meaning which, as was noted earlier, is the feature truly distinguishing pseudo-coordination from ordinary coordination, has gone unnoticed.

Let us now return to the initial question of whether Swedish postural verb constructions can be regarded as progressive markers or not. It was shown above that some of the formal features, such as the wide scope of the negative particle or the position of the subject in interrogative sentences, which are commonly adduced as evidence of the grammaticalization of the postural verb construction into a progressive marker (cf. for instance Kuteva 1998a,

17 On the other hand, Teleman et al. (1999: Vol. 4, 907), somewhat uncritically, include among pseudo-coordinations constructions with sluta ‘to stop’ + infinitive:

(i) Slut-a och tjat-a. stop-IMP and nag-IMP ‘Stop nagging.’

The verb sluta is mostly combined with an infinitive (or an infinitival clause) by means of the particle att (not och, as in (26)). In colloquial speech, however, the pronunciation of the infinitive particle att and that of the conjunction och ‘and’ have merged into a short [ç] sound, and in spelling both och and att occur, though a Google search for the sequences sluta att tjata and sluta och tjata on Swedish internet sites (i.e. those with the top level domain .se) revealed that instances with att are much more frequent than instances with och (117 and 18 hits respectively; search conducted in November 2005). So examples such as (i) above are not genuine cases of pseudo-coordination, which accounts for the lack of a purposive relation linking sluta (‘to stop’) and tjata (‘to nag’); in other words, the speaker does not want the addressee to stop in order to nag, but rather he wants him to stop nagging.


1999, Tonne 1999: 134, 2001) are in fact characteristic of pseudo-coordination in general. Pseudo-coordination is doubtlessly a distinct construction, but its main function is not to express progressive meaning, but rather to mark the existence of a purposive relation holding between two apparently coordinated clauses, such that the action coded by the first verb is undertaken in order to bring about the action coded by the second. This granted, it must nevertheless be admitted that pseudo-coordination with postural verbs differs in some respects from other subtypes of pseudo-coordination; these differences are discussed in the next section. 3.2.2.2. Postural verbs and adverbial specification There is no doubt that, as has often been pointed out in the literature, pseudo-coordination with postural verbs refers to events in progress (e.g. Han sitter och läser ‘he sits and reads’, ‘he sits reading’). This should come as no surprise, since the lexical meaning of postural verbs inherently refers to a posture, i.e. to a specific state. As a result, the purposive meaning tends to be less salient in pseudo-coordinations with postural verbs. The tendency to express progressive meaning, however, is not restricted to pseudo-coordinations with postural verbs, but is characteristic of all pseudo-coordinations in which the first verb possesses the semantic feature ‘state, duration’. For instance the verb vänta ‘to wait’ expresses a particular state, and consequently pseudo-coordinations with vänta in the first coordinate also refer to an event in progress:

(27) De driftiga och kompetenta personer som vi är beroende av för vår välfärd väntar inte och ser. De agerar och flyttar. ‘The ambitious and competent persons on whom we depend for our welfare do not wait and see. They act and move out of the country.’ (www.riksdagen.se/debatt/ 9900/prot/ 28/ 28S00035.ASP)

(28) Spela så fort ni kan – vänta inte och tro att tiden ska räcka till längre fram, det brukar bli ont om tid på slutet med allt som ska hinnas med. ‘Play as fast as you can – do not wait thinking that there is enough time, usually in the end there is not enough time for everything that needs to be done.’ (www.algonet.se/thu/femail/dagbok/2001/maj.html)

These examples are clearly pseudo-coordinations; notice in this regard the negative particle inte negating both verbs. Pseudo-coordinations not having a


stative verb in the first coordinate do not denote events in progress, but merely some kind of simultaneity of the verbal actions involved, because one action is performed with a view to the performance of the other, which often implies that both actions take place at about the same time (cf. vi ringer inte och påminner dig ‘we won’t call to remind you’ in (20) above).

Nevertheless, pseudo-coordination with postural verbs differs from other subtypes of pseudo-coordination in two respects, namely:

i. its relative frequency by comparison with other kinds of pseudo-coordination

ii. the lack of a place or manner adverbial to specify the postural verb With respect to (i), there is no doubt that pseudo-coordinations with postural verbs are much more frequent than pseudo-coordinations with other kinds of verbs, which explains why research has tended to focus on the former. As regards (ii), like postural verbs in other languages (witness sit or stand in English), Swedish postural verbs usually require some kind of adverbial specification (e.g. han sitter där, i soffan, obekvämt, etc. ‘He is sitting over there, in the sofa, uncomfortably, etc.’), unless the posture itself is at issue, as in han sitter inte, utan han står ‘he is not sitting, he is standing upright.’ Yet when they occur in a pseudo-coordination they are always used absolutely, that is, without a following adverbial of place or manner.18 It is probably this feature that has led some authors to assert that the meaning of the postural verb in a pseudo-coordination is “bleached” (cf. Holmes & Hinchliffe 2003[1994]: 242).

Summing up, pseudo-coordinations with postural verbs can be said to approach a grammaticalized progressive construction in that, syntactically, the postural verb lacks any adverbial specification, which is otherwise exceptional, and semantically the construction refers to an event in progress, as a result of the fact that postural verbs carry the lexical feature ‘state’. It is therefore a more or less preformed pattern readily available to the speaker.19

18 In all pseudo-coordinations the conjunction och must follow immediately after the first verb; when this is a transitive verb, it will therefore lack a direct object. However, unlike the adverbials with postural verbs, the implicit object can be recovered from the second coordinate, as in example (20) above: Vi ringer inte och påminner dig ‘We won’t call to remind you’. 19 Two other types of partly grammaticalized pseudo-coordinations are those with ta ‘to take’ and vara ‘to be’:


3.3. Grammaticalized progressives Truly grammaticalized progressives are marked by distinctive formal properties and are associated with the meaning ‘event in progress’. However, even within grammaticalized progressives it is possible to distinguish two types, depending on whether they form part of a paradigm with non-progressive verb forms or not. PARADIGM is here understood essentially as defined by Coseriu, namely as a class consisting of the present expression and all those expressions that are immediately excluded by its choice (“[Es besteht] aus dem anwesenden Ausdruck und aus den Ausdrücken, die durch seine Anwesenheit unmittelbar ausgeschlossen werden”, Coseriu 1992[1988]: 145). The members of a paradigm are opposed to one another, so that they constitute a series of mutually exclusive options, e.g. in German, choosing a dative excludes the nominative and the accusative, as they cannot occur in the same syntactic environment. Generally, paradigmatic integration is considered to be typical of grammatical items and categories as opposed to lexical items; witness paradigms such as indicative – subjunctive – imperative, active – passive – medio-passive. However, paradigmatic integration is not a feature exclusive to grammatical items. Even those who do not support Lexical Field Theory as developed by Jost Trier (1931) will

(ii) Ta och skynda dig, är du snäll! take and hurry yourself, are you kind ‘Hurry up (now), please!’ (Teleman et al. 1999: Vol. 4, 907)

(iii) Vad gör du när du inte är och planterar träd? what do you when you not are and plant trees ‘What are you doing when you are not out planting trees?’ (Teleman et al. 1999: Vol. 4, 905)

The transitive verb ta normally requires a direct object, but in pseudo-coordination it is always used absolutely, and the construction as a whole expresses the beginning of an action rather than a purposive relation; for an account of Norwegian data, cf. Vannebo (2003), who, however, does not always clearly distinguish between genuine instances of pseudo-coordination with ta and ordinary coordinate clauses with an ellipted object, as in han tok og lest ei bok I går ‘he took and read a book yesterday’. As regards example (iii) above, in pseudo-coordinations with vara ‘to be’ the verb lacks a predicative complement or a place/manner adverbial to specify it; the construction as a whole denotes an action that is being executed by someone away from the speaker, hence the label ABSENTIVE coined by de Groot (2000) for analogous expressions found in a number of European languages.


agree that, among other examples, kinship terms belong to a language-specific paradigm. For instance Scandinavian languages distinguish between aunts and uncles on the father’s side (Swedish faster and farbror, respectively) and aunts and uncles on the mother’s side (Swedish moster and morbror, respectively), whereas the paradigm in modern English is restricted to aunt and uncle, regardless of the kinship relation to one’s parents. Conversely, not every grammatical item or category is integrated into a paradigm. 3.3.1. Paradigmatically non-integrated progressives A good example of a paradigmatically non-integrated progressive is provided by the aan-het-progressive in Dutch:

(29) Op dit moment zijn wij software aan het bouw-en at this moment are we software at the make-INF ‘At the moment we are developing software.’ (www.zeevaartopleidingen.nl/ kijkopleren/ body_ methodiek.htm)

The Dutch aan-het-progressive is unquestionably an independent grammatical construction associated with the meaning ‘event in progress’; on the surface it appears to be the combination of the copula verb zijn ‘to be’ and a nominalized infinitive linked to it by the preposition aan and preceded by the definite article (lit. ‘to be at the doing something’). A closer look reveals, however, several special properties, such as the fact that the infinitive cannot be premodified by adjectives and can govern a direct object (e.g. software in (29)). By contrast, in all its other uses a nominalized infinitive allows adjectival premodification but cannot take an object. The aan-het-progressive is a frequently used grammatical device that occurs in all tenses, though it lacks a passive form.

Yet the Dutch aan-het-progressive is not the member of a paradigm, at least not in the sense of a mutually exclusive opposition as defined above. Its natural paradigmatic counterpart would be the simple form, which, for lack of a better term, I would like to call NON-PROGRESSIVE, as there is no generally accepted term for it. Contrary to ordinary grammatical paradigms, the non-progressive can replace the progressive in all contexts (but not vice versa); witness (30), which just like (29) refers to an event in progress:

(30) Op dit moment bouwen wij software. ‘At the moment we are developing software.’


(30) is an invented example in order to show the parallel with the progressive in (29), but examples of non-progressives clearly referring to events in progress can easily be found:

(31) Je wil me dus niet zegg-en wat je leest. you want me so not say-INF what you read ‘So you don’t want to tell me what you are reading.’ (Pol Hoste, “Het Boek”, De Brakke Hond 55 [1997]).

So the non-progressive also covers the sphere of usage of the aan-het-progressive and both forms are interchangeable in progressive contexts, the only difference being that the aan-het-progressive EXPLICITLY signals an event in progress, whereas with the non-progressive the aspectual opposition perfective/imperfective has to be inferred from the context, namely, from the adverbial op dit moment ‘at the moment’ in (30).

In order to determine the exact nature of the relation between the more explicit aan-het-progressive and the non-progressive one could look at what Jakobson called ASYMMETRIC MORPHOLOGICAL CORRELATION PAIRS (“asymmetrische morphologische Korrelationspaare”), which he described for the first time in his “Zur Struktur des russischen Verbums” (1932) with respect to aspect correlations in Russian consisting of an unmarked imperfective and a marked perfective aspect form. Jakobson introduces the concept of a correlation between the marked and unmarked members of an opposition by means of a lexical example, namely oslíca ‘female donkey’ and osël ‘donkey’ (Jakobson 1971[1932]: 4).20 The term oslíca bears a kind of semantic mark indicating female sex, whereas osël lacks any specification for sex and can be used not only for male donkeys but also for the category of donkeys in general. Thus the difference between marked and unmarked is not that between X and non-X, but between X and indifference between X and non-X. Only in certain (contrastive) contexts an immediate opposition emerges between oslíca ‘female donkey’ and osël ‘(male) donkey’; witness èto oslíca? ‘is that a female donkey?’ – nét, osël ‘no, a (male) donkey.’21

20 As pointed out by Kortlandt (1995: 97), in the 1932 version of his paper Jakobson used (p. 75) a different example, also taken from Russian: telenok ‘calf’ vs. telka ‘heifer’. 21 Jakobson returned to this issue at various times (cf. Jakobson 1971[1936], 1971[1957]) in connection with case and verbal categories.


The opposition between the marked and unmarked members of a pair has also been discussed by Coseriu (1992[1988]: 212–226), though from a different perspective. According to Coseriu, the opposition between male and female in Spanish padre ‘father’ and madre ‘mother’ is a normal opposition, but is neutralized under certain conditions, for instance in mis padres ‘my parents’. Here the unmarked member represents both members of the opposition, i.e. padre + madre. Coseriu’s example differs from Jakobson’s in that Jakobson considers that the general meaning of the unmarked member is primary, and that the opposition between the marked and unmarked members emerges only in appropriate contexts; for Coseriu, by contrast, what is primary is the opposition between both members of the pair. Analogous examples of asymmetric opposition pairs have been discussed by Greenberg (1966: 25–31).22

Coming back now to the aan-het-progressive and the non-progressive in Dutch, the relation between them does not seem to exhibit the characteristics of an asymmetric correlation pair or a neutralization, as discussed above. Jakobson’s example (osël and oslíca) does not provide a good parallel because the aan-het-progressive is merely an aspectual specification of the way an event takes place, which is left unspecified in the case of the non-progressive, as this signals neither an event in progress nor its opposite. Actual opposition between an event in progress and a non-progressive event can only be marked contextually by means of lexical items, and then both the progressive (32) and the non-progressive (33) are allowed by the grammar of Dutch:

(32) Ik lees vaak, maar op dit moment ben ik niet aan het I read often but at this moment am I not at the

lez-en. read-INF

(33) Ik lees vaak, maar op dit moment lees ik niet. I read often but at this moment read I not

Both sentences are equally correct, and both would be rendered in English as ‘I often read, but right now I am not reading’. The opposition between reading as a habit (the first clause) and reading as an ongoing action (the

22 Hjelmslev (1985[1933]) provides an early account of asymmetric morphological correlations. For a recent approach to the issue of markedness see in particular Haspelmath (2006).


second clause) is marked by vaak ‘often’ and op dit moment ‘at this moment’, respectively, rather than by the verb forms themselves.

The parallel with Coseriu’s example fails too because there is no opposition to be neutralized. Unlike padres in mis padres, which refers to both ‘father’ and ‘mother’, the non-progressive does not refer to an action as being in progress and not being in progress AT THE SAME TIME. Rather, the relation between the aan-het-progressive and the non-progressive resembles the relation between a hyponym and its hyperonym: in the pair chair and furniture, furniture does not constitute the opposite of chair, nor chair the opposite of furniture; furniture is just the more general term.

The Dutch aan-het-progressive resembles the German am-progressive (e.g. Sie ist am Lesen ‘she is reading’) in many respects. Contrary to the situation in Dutch, however, the German am-progressive shows considerable regional variation regarding its frequency and syntactic properties (for discussion see Krause 2002 and Van Pottelberge 2004: 203–230, and references there). But generally speaking it can be said that the German am-progressive is not paradigmatically integrated either, can always be replaced by the non-progressive, and is subject to a number of systematic restrictions, such as the inability to govern an object (except in Swiss German and Rhenish dialects). The Dutch progressive, not being subject to comparable restrictions or to regional variation, is thus a less peripheral grammatical construction.

3.3.2. Paradigmatically integrated progressives The most obvious example of a paradigmatically integrated progressive in the Germanic languages is the English progressive, also frequently referred to as the EXPANDED FORM. The expanded form is opposed to the “simple form”, and both forms make up a paradigm in the sense defined earlier in §3.3. The status of the English progressive as a fully grammaticalized construction is uncontroversial, as is reflected by the extensive coverage accorded to it in both reference grammars of English (Quirk et al. 1985: 197–213, Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 162–172) and research monographs (Nehls 1974, Scheffer 1975, Núñez-Pertejo 2004, Smitterberg 2005).

As pointed out above (§3.3), paradigmatic integration implies that the selection of one form excludes the other form, and vice versa, so that they cannot be exchanged in one and the same context without substantially affecting the sentence meaning (cf. Coseriu 1992[1988]: 144). This means


that the rules governing the choice of either a simple or an expanded form are not optional, and thus speakers who wish to refer to an event in progress, as in (34), must obligatorily select the expanded form:

(34) At the moment, he is reading the newspaper. In the above context the simple form is simply ineligible; witness the ungrammaticality of *At the moment, he reads the newspaper. Pragmatic considerations, namely the fact that the progressive nature of the action is already clear from the overall context, so that the use of the progressive form is superfluous from a strictly informational point of view, are of no relevance.

Unlike the Dutch non-progressive the English simple form is explicit as to the aspectual character of the action, and signals that the action is not in progress:

(35) John is cleaning the kitchen. (36) John cleans the kitchen.

(35) implies that John is actually cleaning the kitchen at the moment of speaking, whereas (36) refers to the fact that cleaning the kitchen is John’s task or habit, or maybe (depending on the context) that John is cleaning the kitchen as part of a series of actions.

Despite the paradigmatic opposition between the English simple and expanded forms, there exist a few contexts that allow both forms without any noticeable difference in meaning; witness verbs of bodily sensation (ache, hurt, itch, etc.), as in My foot is itching – My foot itches,23 or verbs such as live or work, which can occur in both the present perfect and the present perfect progressive: I have lived in London for several years – I have been living in London for several years (see Nehls 1974: 104–116, Quirk et al. 1985: 211). However, the interchangeability of these cases cannot be compared to the situation in Dutch (cf. (32) and (33) above), where the non-progressive can literally substitute for EVERY aan-het-progressive.

23 Some authors (e.g. Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 170) argue that with verbs of bodily sensation there is no identity in meaning, as the non-progressive “indicates a state”, whereas the progressive “suggests an activity”.


The distinction that has been put forward in this section between paradigmatically integrated and paradigmatically non-integrated periphrastic constructions is of course not new. It is more or less explicitly invoked by most grammarians engaged in the compilation of the grammar of a given language, as paradigmatically non-integrated constructions are much more likely to be left out of the description than paradigmatically integrated ones. A far more explicit discussion of the distinction can however be found in Lehmann’s pioneering monograph on grammaticalization (1995[1982]: 132ff), where he introduces the notion of PARADIGMATIC COHESION or PARADIGMATICITY, and defines it as “the formal and semantic integration both of a paradigm as a whole and of a single subcategory into the paradigm of its generic category” (p. 132), going on to add that paradigmaticity “is gradually reached in the process of grammaticalization: categories grammaticalized very little do not constitute […] tightly integrated paradigms” (p. 134). Yet though the process of paradigmatic integration is no doubt a gradual phenomenon, with the members of a paradigm spreading gradually from one context to another, and from one variety to another, I would like to argue here that being obligatory or being optional (in a specific context or a specific variety) are discrete properties; hence the difference between paradigmatically integrated and paradigmatically non-integrated periphrastic constructions should itself be seen as a discrete (i.e. qualitative) property.

4. Concluding remarks

The application of Saussure’s definition of the linguistic sign to various expressions in the Germanic languages capable of conveying progressive meaning revealed that, first, not all expressions that have been labelled “progressives” in the literature constitute grammatical constructions in their own right, or qualify as progressive constructions, as discussed in connection with sequences involving gerade + verb in German (§3.1). Second, it was also shown that there exist substantial differences between, on the one hand, constructions approaching genuine progressive markers, such as Dutch bezig zijn + infinitival clause (§3.2.1) or Swedish constructions with postural verbs (§3.2.2), and, on the other hand, fully grammaticalized patterns such as the Dutch aan-het-progressive (§3.3.1) or the English progressive (§3.3.2).


The nature of such differences can fruitfully be described in terms of the distinction between NORM and SYSTEM as proposed by Coseriu (1975[1952]). Coseriu views the concept of language norm as a level that mediates between the language system proper and actual speech: while the system is understood as an entity which contains all the functional oppositions, the elements and procedures of a given language, the norm, by contrast, comprises those realisations that are traditional and stable in language use, but whether these realisations are functional or not is of no importance. In this light, only the fully grammaticalized constructions discussed in §3.3 can be considered as part of the system of the language in question.

Whether the various classes of constructions examined in this paper can be regarded as successive historical stages is an open question that can only be answered by historical investigations. But in principle the possibility exists that systematic rules may arise not as a result of prior deviations from the “norm”, but simply by analogy with related patterns already existing in the language (this seems to have been the case, for instance, for the Dutch aan-het-progressive, which developed the possibility of governing direct objects by analogy with other periphrastic verb forms, as discussed in Van Pottelberge 2004: 135–143).

On the surface, the classification that has been proposed here for progressive constructions in the Germanic languages suggests the kind of continuum, ranging from free syntactic expressions to paradigmatically integrated constructions, which is assumed in much research on grammaticalization (for discussion see, for instance, Hopper & Traugott 2003[1993]: 6–7). However, the idea of a “continuum” is only acceptable as a metaphor, as the differences between the patterns examined do not consist of a series of properties gradually increasing or decreasing in number and/or statistical frequency from one pattern to another, but are, instead, discrete, i.e. of a qualitative nature. They reflect, in other words, Saussure’s notion of the linguistic sign, which depends crucially on the relation between formal properties and linguistic meaning, with this form-meaning relation understood as necessarily stable, and not gradual.

References Andersson, Lars-Gunnar. 1979. Några v-v konstruktioner. (Gothenburg Papers in

Theoretical Linguistics 40). Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitet.


Behrens, Leila. 1999. “Semantics and typology”. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 53: 21–38 [Special issue on Methodological issues in current typological research, ed. by Peter Siemund].

Bertinetto, Pier Marco. 2000. “The progressive in Romance as compared with English”. In: Dahl, ed. 559–604.

Bertinetto, Pier Marco, Karen H. Ebert & Casper de Groot. 2000. “The progressive in Europe”. In: Dahl, ed. 517–558.

Coseriu, Eugenio. 1975[1952]. “System, Norm und Rede”. In: Eugenio Coseriu, ed. Sprachtheorie und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft: 5 Studien. München: Wilhelm Fink, 11–101.

Coseriu, Eugenio. 1987: “Bedeutung, Bezeichnung und sprachliche Kategorien”. Sprachwissenschaft 12: 1–23.

Coseriu, Eugenio. 1992[1988]. Einführung in die Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft. 2nd edition. Tübingen: Francke.

Coseriu, Eugenio. 2003. Geschichte der Sprachphilosophie: Von den Anfängen bis Rousseau. Tübingen: Francke.

Croft, William. 2001. Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Croft, William. 2003[1990]. Typology and universals. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and aspect systems. Oxford & New York: Blackwell. Dahl, Östen. 1995. “The tense system of Swedish”. In: Rolf Thieroff & Joachim

Ballweg, eds. Tense systems in European languages II. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 59–68.

Dahl, Östen, ed. 2000. Tense and aspect in the languages of Europe. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter.

De Groot, Casper. 2000. “The absentive”. In: Dahl, ed. 693–719. Denison, David. 1998. “Syntax”. The Cambridge history of the English language, Vol.

2: 1776–1997 ed. by Suzanne Romaine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 92–329.

De Vos, Mark. 2004. “Pseudo-coordination is not subordination”. In: Leonie Cornips & Jenny Doetjes, eds. Linguistics in the Netherlands 2004. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 181–192.

Donaldson, Bruce. 1997. Dutch: A comprehensive grammar. London & New York: Routledge.

Ebert, Karen. 1996. “Progressive aspect in German and Dutch”. Interdisciplinary Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis 1: 41–62.

Ebert, Karen. 2000. “Progressive markers in Germanic languages”. In: Dahl, ed. 605–653.

Faarlund, Jan Terje & Peter Trudgill. 1999. “Pseudo-coordination in English: The ‘try and’ problem”. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 47: 210–213.


Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Greenberg, Joseph. 1966. Language universals: With special reference to feature hierarchies. Den Haag & Paris: Mouton.

Harris, Roy, translator & annotator. 1983. F. de Saussure: Course in general linguistics. London: Duckworth.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2003. “The geometry of grammatical meaning: Semantic maps and cross-linguistic comparison“. In: Michael Tomasello, ed. The new psychology of language. Vol. 2. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 211–242.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2006. “Against markedness (and what to replace it with)”. Journal of Linguistics 42: 25–70.

Hjelmslev, Louis. 1971[1943]. Prolegomènes à une théorie de langage. Traduit du danois par Una Canger. Paris: Editions de minuit.

Hjelmslev, Louis. 1985[1933]. “Structure des corrélations linguistiques”. In: Louis Hjelmslev, Nouveaux essais. Recueillis et présentés par François Rastier. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 25–66.

Hewson, John. 1997. “Tense and aspect in modern Germanic”. In: John Hewson & Vit Bubenik, eds. Tense and aspect in Indo-European languages: Theory, typology, diachrony. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 331–350.

Holmes, Philip & Ian Hinchliffe. 2003[1994]. Swedish: A comprehensive grammar. 2nd edition. London & New York: Routledge.

Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003[1993]. Grammaticalization. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hoste, Pol. 1997. “Het Boek”. De Brakke Hond 55. [Internet edition: http://www. brakkehond.be]

Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jakobson, Roman. 1971[1932]. “Zur Struktur des russischen Verbums”. In: Jakobson, ed. 3–15. [First published in Charisteria Guilelmo Mathesio quinquagenario a discipulis et Circuli Linguistici Pragensis sodalibus oblata. Prag: 1932, 74–84.]

Jakobson, Roman. 1971[1936]. “Beitrag zur allgemeinen Kasuslehre”. In: Jakobson, ed. 23–71. [First published in Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague 6: 240–288.]

Jakobson, Roman. 1971[1957]. “Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb”. In: Jakobson, ed. 130–147. [First published by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, 1957.]

Jakobson, Roman, ed. 1971. Selected writings. Vol. II: Word and language. Den Haag & Paris: Mouton.


Jakobson, Roman. 1987. “On linguistic aspects of translation”. In: Krystyna Pomorska & Stephen Rudy, eds. Language in literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 428–435.

Johannessen, Janne Bondi. 1998. Coordination. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Klooster, Wim. 2001. Grammatica van het hedendaags Nederlands: Een volledig overzicht. Den Haag: Sdu.

Königs, Karin. 1995. “Zur Übersetzung der Verlaufsform ins Deutsche”. Lebende Sprachen 40: 153–158.

Kortlandt, Frederik. 1995. “General linguistics and Indo-European reconstruction”. Rask 2: 91–109.

Kortteinen, Pauli. 2000. “Pseudosamordning med verben stå, sitta och ligga i svenskt-franskt kontrastivt perspektiv”. Meddelanden från Institutionen för Svenska Språket (MISS) 33: 247–263. [Special Issue: Att använda SAG. 29 uppsatser om Svenska Akademiens grammatik].

Krause, Olaf. 2002. Der Progressiv im Deutschen: Eine empirische Untersuchung im Kontrast mit Niederländisch und Englisch. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.

Kuteva, Tanja. 1998a. “Large linguistic areas in grammaticalization: Auxiliation in Europe”. Language Sciences 20: 289–311.

Kuteva, Tanja. 1998b. “On identifying an evasive gram: Action narrowly averted”. Studies in Language 22: 113–160.

Kuteva, Tanja. 1999. “On ‘sit’ / ‘stand’ / ‘lie’ auxiliation”. Linguistics 37: 191–213. Kuteva, Tanja. 2002. Auxiliation: An enquiry into the nature of grammaticalization.

Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lehmann, Christian. 1995[1982]. Thoughts on grammaticalization.

München/Newcastle: LINCOM Europa. Lødrup, Helge. 2002. “The syntactic structures of Norwegian pseudocoordinations”.

Studia Linguistica 56: 121–143. Mulder, J. W. F. & S. G. J. Hervey. 1972. Theory of the linguistic sign. Den Haag &

Paris: Mouton. Myre Jørgensen, Annette. 2003. “La pseudocoordination verbale en norvégien et en

espagnol”. Revue Romane 38: 53–66. Nehls, Dietrich. 1974. Synchron-diachrone Analyse zur expanded form im Englischen.

Eine struktural-funktionale Analyse. München: Max Hueber. Núñez-Pertejo, Paloma. 2004. The progressive in the history of English: A corpus-based

study. München: LINCOM Europa. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A

comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.


Ragnarsdóttir, Hrafnhildur, Sven Strömqvist & Åsa Nordqvist. 2000. “Completed and progressive action in Swedish and Icelandic child language”. In: Eve V. Clark, ed. Proceedings of the 30th Stanford Child Language Research Forum. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 95–104.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1968–1974[1916]. Cours de linguistique générale. Edition critique par Rudolf Engler. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1995[1916]. Cours de linguistique générale. Publié par Charles Bally et Albert Sechehaye. Édition critique par Tullio de Mauro, postface de Louis-Jean Calvet. Paris: Payot & Rivages.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 2002. Écrits de linguistique générale. Texte etabli et édité par Simon Bouquet & Rudolf Engler. Paris: Gallimard.

Scheffer, Johannes. 1975. The progressive in English. Amsterdam & Oxford: North-Holland.

Smitterberg, Erik. 2005. The progressive in 19th-century English: A process of integration. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Spang-Hanssen, Henning. 1954. Recent theories on the nature of the language sign. København: Nordisk Sprog- och Kulturforlag.

Teleman, Ulf, Staffan Hellberg & Erik Andersson. 1999. Svenska Akademiens grammatik. 4 vols. Stockholm: Svenska Akademien.

Thieroff, Rolf. 1999. “Review of Hewson & Bubenik 1997”. Studies in Language 23: 675–684.

Thorell, Olof. 1987[1973]. Svensk grammatik. 2nd edition. Stockholm: Esselte Studium.

Tonne, Ingebjørg. 1999. “A Norwegian progressive marker and the level of grammaticalization”. Languages in Contrast 2: 131–161.

Tonne, Ingebjørg. 2001. Progressives in Norwegian and the theory of aspectuality. Oslo: Unipub.

Trier, Jost. 1931. Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes: Die Geschichte eines sprachlichen Feldes. Heidelberg: Winter.

Vannebo, Kjell Ivor. 2003. “Ta og ro deg ned noen hakk: On pseudocoordination with the verb ta ‘take’ in a grammaticalization perspective”. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 26: 165–193.

Van der Auwera, Johan & Vladimir A. Plungian. 1998. “Modality’s semantic map”. Linguistic Typology 2: 79–124.

Van Pottelberge, Jeroen. 2002. “Nederlandse progressiefconstructies met werkwoorden van lichaamshouding – Specificiteit en geschiedenis”. Nederlandse Taalkunde 7: 142–174.

Van Pottelberge, Jeroen. 2004. Der am-Progressiv: Struktur und parallele Entwicklungen in den kontinentalgermanischen Sprachen. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.


Vismans, Roel. 1983. “Duratieve konstrukties in het Nederlands in vergelijking met de Engelse progressive”. In: B. Callebaut & A. A. Meersman, eds. Handelingen van het 2de Fakulteitscolloquium, gehouden te Gent op 24–26 november 1982. Linguistische en socio-culturele aspecten van het taalonderwijs. Gent: Rijksuniversiteit Gent, Fakulteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte, 373–380.

Waugh, Linda R. 1984. “Some remarks on the nature of the linguistic sign”. In: Jerzy Pelc, Thomas A. Sebeok, Edward Stankiewicz & Thomas G. Winner, eds. Sign, system and function. Papers of the first and second Polish-American semiotics colloquia. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 389–438.

Author’s address Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders / Ghent University

Blandijnberg 2 B-9000 Ghent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected]

received: 14 Dec 2005 revision invited: 14 Feb 2006

revised version accepted: 13 Nov 2006

Documents

Defining grammatical constructions as a linguistic sign: The case …tania/CMGD/periphrasic... · 2008. 4. 14. · reinterpretation of the definition of the linguistic sign by Ferdinand