16.1798, Review: Historical Ling/Corpus Ling/Syntax: Smitterberg

[LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1798. Wed Jun 08 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.1798, Review: Historical Ling/Corpus Ling/Syntax: Smitterberg

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org) 
        Sheila Dooley, U of Arizona  
        Terry Langendoen, U of Arizona  

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomi at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

What follows is a review or discussion note contributed to our 
Book Discussion Forum. We expect discussions to be informal and 
interactive; and the author of the book discussed is cordially 
invited to join in. If you are interested in leading a book 
discussion, look for books announced on LINGUIST as "available 
for review." Then contact Sheila Dooley at collberg at linguistlist.org. 

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 07-Jun-2005
From: Clemens Fritz < clemens.fritz at clemens-fritz.de >
Subject: The progressive in 19th-century English 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2005 02:21:22
From: Clemens Fritz < clemens.fritz at clemens-fritz.de >
Subject: The progressive in 19th-century English 
 

AUTHOR: Smitterberg, Erik
TITLE: The Progressive in 19th-century English
SUBTITLE: A process of integration
SERIES: Language and Computers 54
PUBLISHER: Rodopi
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-606.html


Clemens Fritz, Freie Universität Berlin

SUMMARY

Smitterberg's "The progressive in 19th-century English" is a superb 
account of the development of the progressive, its different forms and 
uses in Late Modern English English (EngE). For the nineteenth 
century the development of the passive progressive and the 
progressive form of 'be' have been recorded, but so far there has 
been no comprehensive corpus-based study of the progressive using 
periods, genre and gender as variables. The author's findings are 
corpus-based and are related to previous research throughout. The 
basic line of argument is that quantitative developments reveal where 
and to what extent the progressive became increasingly integrated 
into EngE. The book's wide scope will make it a convenient and 
reliable reference work and should stimulate further research.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The book is divided into eight chapters, a references section and 
three appendices; an index, which would have made the book even 
more accessible, is missing. The table of contents is very detailed 
allowing quick access to select points of interest. At the beginning of 
each chapter and sub-chapter the planned course is outlined; 
summaries are provided throughout. The first two chapters deal with 
methodology and the corpus used. In Chapters 3-7 several 
investigations are presented which are then summarized in Chapter 8. 

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

Chapter 1:
It contains the general background, the aim and scope of the study, 
the terminology, the analytical frameworks and typographical and 
statistical conventions. Smitterberg chose the nineteenth century, 
since it is a relatively neglected period of study. Too long it was 
assumed that language use then was next to identical to present-day 
English (PDE). Only recently interest in late Modern English has 
grown; e.g. Bailey (1996), Fritz (fc.), Goerlach (1999) and Romaine 
(1998).

The progressive in the nineteenth century has been dealt with in 
several important articles, e.g. Arnaud (1998), Geisler (2003) and 
Hundt (2004). Apart from that, historical grammars, e.g. Visser (1973) 
and Denison (1998) are taken into account by Smitterberg. Another 
very influential background is Biber (1988) with his cross-genre 
analysis of the co-occurrence patterns of a large number of linguistic 
features. Biber identified several dimensions of language, e.g. 
involved vs. informational production; some of them distinguish 
typically oral from literate genres. Smitterberg uses all these 
investigations to find research questions and as points of comparison 
for his results. 

Chapter 2:
Smitterberg here presents his database, a Corpus Of Nineteenth 
Century English (CONCE). This corpus was not specially built for the 
study and is not available publicly yet. CONCE contains ca. 900,000 
words of nineteenth century EngE. It is subdivided into three periods 
(1800-30, 1850-70 and 1870-1900), each of which contain the same 
amount of words in the following genres: Debates, Drama, Fiction, 
History, Letters, Science and Trials. 

Two limitations fall into view immediately. First, CONCE is small 
compared to corpora of present-day English; but other historical 
corpora, like ARCHER and the Helsinki Corpus, even have a smaller 
number of words per century. Second, the material used is restricted 
to published material mostly by well-educated, well-known and well-off 
persons. This raises questions of representativity. Although 
Smitterberg retrieves the progressives from CONCE via a 
concordance program, WordSmith Tools, he takes great care to find 
the best search strings and through extensive post-editing he arrives 
at reliable data.

Chapter 3:
This chapter discusses four methods of measuring the frequency of 
the progressive and states how these methods relate to variationist 
studies. Three have already been used in previous research, the 
fourth method is a new one designed by the author himself.

In the following Smitterberg uses the M-coefficient, which normalizes 
the raw frequency of the progressive to occurrences per 100,000 
words, and the S-coefficient, which establishes the number of 
progressives in relation to the number of non-progressives. Applying 
the M-coefficient, Smitterberg can show that the progressive rises 
considerably in frequency over the three periods (172 - 263 - 316).

The seven genres show widely differing M-coefficients; they are 
lowest for Science (85) and Debates (89) and highest for Letters 
(307) and Trials (309). Clearly, use of the progressive is very genre-
specific. Differences increase over time, showing that the genres 
themselves develop new forms and functions and that the progressive 
aids these developments. Progressives are also much more frequent 
in female than in male writings. Here, too, differences increase over 
time.

Chapter 4:
The chapter compares some of the results from Chapter 3 with the 
results of Geisler's (2003) factor score analysis. The aim is to see 
whether, for example, high frequencies of the progressives co-occur 
with high frequencies of features characteristic of involved or 
informational production. This can yield insights into the functions of 
the progressive. Smitterberg shows that orality correlates positively 
with higher frequencies for the progressive. The same goes for 
involved production and situation-dependent reference.

Chapter 5:
In this chapter, the occurrence patterns of the progressive within the 
verb phrase is analysed. Four features are looked at: tense (present 
vs. past), the perfect, voice and modal auxiliaries. For the first two, no 
clear diachronic development could be established. For the fourth, the 
number of progressives was actually decreasing. The investigation of 
voice is particularly interesting since there was a new type, the 
passive progressive 'The house is being built', that eventually 
replaced the passival 'The house is building'. The passive progressive 
started in informal genres, gradually spread and finally became the 
dominant mode of expressing passive voice with progressives.

Chapter 6:
Here Smitterberg examines five linguistic variables that have been 
found to be important for the development and distribution of the 
progressive. They are: (1) the main verbs that can form progressives, 
(2) the Aktionsart value of the progressives (stative/non-stative; 
durative/non-durative), (3) the agentivity of the subjects, (4) the 
modification by temporal adverbials and (5) the type of clause 
progressives occur in. 

Smitterberg found clearer indications of change with (4) and (5) than 
with (1)-(3). Non-agentivity with progressives had already risen 
considerably between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but do 
not increase within the nineteenth century. For (4) he states that 
increased integration of the progressive probably led to a decrease in 
the need for modification by temporal adverbials. For (5) the result 
was that the progressive indeed became more frequent in main 
clauses.

Chapter 7:
The term 'not solely aspectual' is used for progressives that express 
something beyond purely aspectual meaning, for instance subjectivity, 
emotional involvement and emphasis. In sum they imply an attitudinal 
focus from the speaker's perspective. This meaning of the progressive 
has been marginalized in present-day English; in CONCE ca. 1/4 of all 
progressives were classified as 'not solely aspectual'. Smitterberg 
investigates (1) progressives modified by 'always' and similar 
adverbials, (2) 'experiential' progressives and (3) 'interpretative' 
progressives. (1) did not change in the course of the century, (2) 
increased significantly in frequency and (3) increased greatly but not 
significantly.

Chapter 8:
In this chapter Smitterberg again summarizes all his findings and here 
and there adds a new note. He stresses that period, genre and 
gender have a definite impact on the frequency of the progressive. He 
also cautions that a multi-faceted feature like the progressive requires 
a multi-faceted approach. The question whether or to what extent the 
progressive became more integrated in nineteenth century English 
greatly depends on the feature investigated. To exemplify this he 
states that some aspects of the integration process had already taken 
place before or by 1800 while others did not really start before 1900. 
He closes the book with suggestions for further research.

Appendices:
These list the sources used for CONCE and its text-level codes and 
spell out the statistical tests done on the data.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

As already stated initially, Smitterberg (2005) is a remarkable and very 
valuable contribution to the historical study of the English language. 
Nevertheless a few critical comments have to be made. The first 
regards the representativity of the corpus used. CONCE is a rather 
small corpus of educated EngE. This should always be borne in mind 
when interpreting the data and generalizing the results. Although true 
representativity can never be achieved, the size and the status bias of 
CONCE certainly greatly influence the outcomes. Smitterberg tends to 
downplay this.

Time and again, Smitterberg admits that due to restrictions of time he 
was unable to follow-up some interesting results with additional 
investigations. While this is very honest, and also understandable, the 
reader sometimes can get the feeling that if Smitterberg had used 
another six months preparing the book it would have been even more 
interesting than it is now.

In isolated cases the coherence of the book seems improvable. 
Smitterberg (p253) states that "the aspects of the progressive that 
were investigated were chosen largely on the basis of what previous 
research has indicated as being of interest and, when possible, on the 
basis of pilot studies". Sometimes the chapters look more like a 
collection of independent papers, a fact partially, but not totally 
remedied by the summarizing chapter 8. In principle it is good that 
Smitterberg continually writes extensive intros and summaries. On the 
other hand, his writings can become repetitive and thus invite skipping 
(since the results will be summarized again later anyway). However, 
this is a potentially dangerous thing, because Smitterberg's carefully 
worded interpretations sometimes become much stronger in the 
summaries and are presented as facts.

It is very laudable that Smitterberg discusses his sources and his 
methodology always using illustrative examples. He is aware of 
possible limitations and he is open about them. This enables the 
readers to find out for themselves whether a result is reliable or 
significant or how it relates to other studies. This also makes it easier 
to compare his findings. His excellent discussion of the theoretical 
issues make the book an excellent reference work for the history of 
the progressive.

Smitterberg is very careful in his data-collection and his 
interpretations. This is wonderfully captured in the 
phrase "potentially 'experiental' progressives" which he uses to show 
that his method of extracting such progressives is not 100 per cent 
perfect and also entails subjective choices. This is not a criticism of 
Smitterberg. He only openly states what all researchers do but do not 
always talk about.

The book contains numerous quotes which help the reader to 
understand Smitterberg's points and also allow independent 
judgments. Another important point is that Smitterberg investigated a 
period of English that has come into focus only recently. No doubt his 
book is another milestone here. Basically there are two desiderata 
which invite more research in this field. Smitterberg's results should be 
compared to results from other, contemporary, varieties and the 
influence of socio-economic status should be investigated.

Fritz (fc.) has looked at nineteenth century English in Australia using a 
self-collected two-million word corpus, COOEE. He found that the 
frequency of the progressive was much more influenced by the origin 
of the author than by gender; origin as a factor is even stronger than 
genre. Status is much less influential than other factors. In general 
progressives are much less frequent in nineteenth century Australia 
than found in Britain (Smitterberg 2005). COOEE and CONCE 
disagree most widely in the genres TRIALS and DRAMA, but are fairly 
equal for HISTORY, SCIENCE and LETTERS.

REFERENCES

Arnaud, R., 1998, The development of the progressive in 19th century 
English: a quantitative survey, Language Variation and Change 10, 
123-52.

Bailey, Richard W., 1996, Nineteenth-Century English, Ann Arbor: The 
University of Michigan Press.

Biber, Douglas, 1988, Variation across Speech and Writing, 
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Denison, David, 1998, Syntax, In: Romaine, Suzanne, ed, 92-329.

Fritz, Clemens, fc., From English in Australia to Australian English: 
1788-1900.

Geisler, Christer, 2003, Gender-based variation in nineteenth century 
English letter writing, In: Leistyna, P. and C. Meyer, eds, Corpus 
Analysis: Language Structure and Language Use, Amsterdam and 
New York: Rodopi, 87-106.

Goerlach, Manfred, 1999, English in Nineteenth-Century England. An 
Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Hundt, Marianne, 2004, The passival and the progressive passive: a 
case study of layering in the English aspect and voice systems, In: 
Lindquist, H. and C. Mair, eds, Corpus Approaches to 
Grammaticalization in English, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John 
Benjamins, 79-120.

Romaine, Suzanne, ed, 1998, 1776-1997 (= Cambridge History of the 
English Language, Vol IV), Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Visser, Fredericus Th., 1973, An Historical Syntax of the English 
Language, Leiden: Brill. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

After studies in Regensburg, Germany, and Galway, Ireland, Clemens 
Fritz graduated with a master's degree in English and History in 1995. 
For ten years now he has worked and published on early Australian 
English. A particular focus is on Irish English and its survival in 
Australia. In 1998 the reviewer started a two-year teacher training 
programme and has been teaching English, history and drama in a 
German secondary school since 2000. For a more detailed CV and a 
list of publications see: http://www.clemens-fritz.de





-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1798