AND or ING? A Syntactic and Morphological Analysis of the Present Participle in the Northern English and Scots of the Late Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Centuries

Abstract

In the Northern English and Scots of the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries the present participle in appositive, adjectival and progressive functions undergoes a change from variants of <and> to variants of <ing>. However, the change does not occur in these functions in the above-mentioned varieties at the same time. This paper offers a qualitative and a quantitative exploration of the development of this change. It focuses on patterns of variation and change, as reflected in the syntactic and morphological distribution of variants of the present participle in late fourteenth- and fifteenth- century Northern English and Scots texts. Data for this study comes from late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts in the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, 850–1700 and the Edinburgh Corpus of Older Scots, 1380–1500, as well as fifteenth-century texts from the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots, 1400–1700 and the Innsbruck Prose Corpus, 1400–1500 (Sampler). The total size of the corpora used for this analysis is 188,112 words. The syntactic functions of the present participle are described and discussed. The syntactic analysis of the data shows that: a) the most frequent type of the present participle in the Northern English and Scots of the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries is in appositive function; and b) the progressive is the least frequent, but the fastest growing, type of participial construction. The morphological and orthographic forms are described and discussed. The morphological analysis shows that: a) the change from variants of <and> to variants of <ing> in the present participle first begins in Northern English in constructions in appositive and adjectival function between 1350 and 1420; b) this change occurs in Scots, too, but at a later date; and c) the change from <and> to <ing> for the progressive takes place in Northern English in the period 1421–1500, but does not happen in Scots until a later date.