Shifting foci in language description and instruction:: Towards a lexical grammar of progressives

This paper refers to selected results from a large-scale corpus-driven analysis of progressives in spoken British English and in the language of teaching materials used in the EFL classroom. It starts from the observation that existing accounts of the progressive either lack a broader empirical basis or mainly focus on written language data. While the larger study deals with a wide range of context and function features of progressive forms in spoken English and so-called 'school' English, the analytic focus in the present paper is on only one particular co-selection phenomenon: progressives and future time reference. Patterns of progressive use will be isolated and the adequacy of existing linguistic and pedagogical descriptions of this construction will be discussed. Of particular interest in this context is the role that the choice of different lexical items plays in a grammatical construction. It will be explored whether co-selection patterns are strongly lexically determined or valid for progressives in general.