On the History of the English Progressive Construction Jane came whistling down the street

Abstract

This article examines the historical development of the VVingOBL construction, as exemplified by “Jane came whistling down the street” or “She went walking up the field path,” where an intransitive motion verb is followed by a present participle and an oblique complement. The analysis looks at the precursors of the construction since Old English and argues that the sharp rise in productivity of the VVingOBL construction, especially from the second half of the nineteenth century, is interrelated with changes affecting English motion vocabulary in Early and Late Modern English and also the increase in frequency of the be progressive over the same period. By the twentieth century, the VVingOBL construction had settled into its modern form, namely a deictic-directional construction with either come or go in the V slot. The article also considers indices of the advancing grammaticalization of the construction. It concludes by discussing whether its morphosyntactic and semantic properties support considering it as a serial verb construction, a hypothesis briefly raised in work by Goldberg (2006:52).