The Extension of the Progressive Form to Stative and Habitual Functions in the Outer Circle Varieties of English 

 

This study examines the extended use of the progressive form to stative verbs and habitual contexts across Outer Circle varieties of English. This phenomenon arouses high interest nowadays because of its pervasiveness in various L1 and L2 varieties of English. Although the examined feature is widely discussed and observed by different scholars, the is no large-scale comparative corpus-based analysis of the pervasiveness of the extended use of the PF across Outer Circle varieties of English. In recent studies, the data was mostly obtained through observation or from the ICE corpora that is relatively small. The present study aims to investigate the extended use of the PF and compare the pervasiveness of the feature across several Outer Circle varieties, using the results from Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbe), which is approx. one hundred times larger than ICE. The results show considerable variation in the frequency of the extended use of the PF among several Outer Circle English varieties. Large data analysis reveals some unexpected results that contradict the previous research and information from the eWAVE. Therefore, the presented findings indicate that further research of the phenomenon using large-scale data might be useful. 

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Keywords: extended use of the progressive form, corpus-based study, GloWbe, outer circle varieties

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About Ekaterina Buchminskaia:

 

Ekaterina Buchminskaia is a master’s student of E-SC. Her research interests are corpus linguistics, English language teaching, and language assessment. The previous research she conducted was in the area of foreign language teaching. Ekaterina Buchminskaia is currently writing her master thesis about online English language instruction in the higher-education institution and working as an assistant for several research projects. 

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