Quantifying Variation of the Expanded Form in English

The use of the Present/Past Progressive or as some people call it: Expanded
Form (EF)in English is part of the curriculum in schools and every students either
native speaker of English or a learner of it as a foreign-language must learn this
part of English grammar.
Next to German, where it is sometimes undefined when you do/did a specific task
it is specified in English by the progressive form. If you did something next to
another action happening you have to use the Progressive tense or if you are
doing something at the moment, like the reader of this term paper is reading at the
moment.
The topic of this term paper is the quantifying variation of the progressive tense
during its development from Old English to Modern English. Therefore I will use
works by Nehls, Denison and Strang on that specific field and combine them in
their resources with Visser which is one of the richest sources of older English to
find out if there are differences or one expands.
First, I am going to give a short summary of the work by the three authors.
Second, I will give an overview over the source constructions of the Progressive
Form (I will use the term ‘Expanded Form as well as ‘Progressive’ because the
composers switch between the two terms). In chapter three I will have a closer
look on the Modern use of the Expanded Form in English and in a fourth step I will
combine the old and modern usage of it to find out what was left or included during
the years. In chapter five I will have a closer look on the mini-corpus-studies by
Mossè and Nickel, who dealt with the emergence of the progressive and show
what changed since they started research on this field. And finally, I will draw a
conclusion about the position of the Expanded Form.

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