PRAGMATICS Smitterberg , Erik . 2005 . The Progressive in 19 th - Century English . A process of integration

In this monograph, which is a revised version of the author's doctoral thesis, Smitterberg presents the first comprehensive cross-genre investigation of the development and use of the progressive in 19th-century (English) English. Drawing on an extensive set of authentic language data, he convincingly demonstrates that this particular period represents an important – and interesting – phase in the 'integration' of the progressive into the grammatical system of the language. 1 Given that the 19th century is a period that has received comparatively little scholarly attention in the area of English syntax, Smitterberg's study is a very welcome addition to the existing literature. The book is divided into eight chapters of varying length. In the opening chapter, readers are introduced to the aim and scope of the investigation and are presented with a brief outline of the study. This is complemented by an overview of terminological, typographical and statistical conventions as well as a discussion of the theoretical and methodological frameworks employed, most prominently corpus linguistics and Biber's (1988) multi-dimensional factor-analysis. In contrast to other studies that have typically focused exclusively on texts where the progressive is found frequently (e.g. letters in Arnaud 1998), Smitterberg's investigation aims to cover a wide range of different genres. In addition, time and sex of the author are considered to be important extralinguistic features that condition the use and development of the construction. The first part of Chapter 2 is devoted to a detailed description of the corpus used in this study, viz. the Corpus of Nineteenth-Century English (CONCE). Containing almost one million words from seven different genres 2 As will become apparent in the chapter summaries presented below, this corpus does indeed offer a suitable basis for many of the issues investigated. However, the relatively small size of individual genre portions