A Conceptual Approach to the -ING Construction: Aspects of Radiality and Subjectification

Abstract: The -ING construction has a number of uses in the English language, and teaching it to speakers of other languages poses some challenges, as learners tend to interpret the construction as a verbal one, in the progressive aspect, which is only one part of the picture. Bearing this in mind, we have developed a corpus-based research into the form-meaning/function pairing (Goldberg, 1995, 2006) of the construction, relying on Construction Grammar (Kay, Fillmore; 1999; Goldberg, 1995, 2006) and Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1987, 1990, 1991, 2008), apart from a semantic approach to the -ING construction (Wierzbicka, 1988), essential for describing the -ING construction from a conceptual perspective within the wide-ranging scope of Cognitive Linguistics (Geeraerts, 2006), which also included Prototype Theory (Rosch, 1973) and Radial Categories (Brugman, 1981; Lakoff, 1987). In regard to methodology, we have taken both a quantitative and qualitative approach to data (Cook; Reichardt, 1979; Richardson, 1985; Creswell, 2010) compiled from an English/Spanish parallel corpus of 1199 verbal -ING occurrences. Our main hypothesis is that the -ING construction, in its verbal function, is more central or prototypical (Rosch, 1973; Brugman, 1981; Lakoff, 1987; Langacker, 2008) in respect to its conceptual network and its other functions, namely nominal, adjectival and adverbial. These functions, in turn, exhibit a more peripheral role and are linked to the verbal function through metaphorical extension relationships (Goldberg, 1995, 2006). By performing a corpus-based analysis of the data (Berber-Sardinha, 2002, 2004) we finally argue that there is a radial organisation (Brugman, 1981; Lakoff, 1987) for the -ING construction, which goes from a more concrete level, being this more situated or grounded and thus more objectified (as a “here and now process”), until it gets to a more abstract level, therefore, less situated and more subjectified (taken as a “thing”).