Perfect and progressive forms in the history of English
The shift from the be-perfect to the have-perfect
Mainly discussing the shift from the be-perfect to the have-perfect of mutative intransitive verbs, I have worked on two papers so far:
- Hundt, Marianne and Yoko Iyeiri. 2025. “Tracing the development of the perfect alternation in Early Modern English”. Diachronica 42(1): 47-81.
- Uchida, Mitsumi & Yoko Iyeiri. 2025. “BE vs. HAVE in the perfect of mutative intransitive verbs: A study on the Middle English translation of Paris and Vienne“. Kwansei Gakuin University School of Sociology Journal 144: 17-29. (Downloadable PDF)
The first is on Early Modern English and the second is on a Middle English text, both a little earlier than the period when a major movement of this shift took place.
This is also a major topic in my book entitled Benjamin Franklin’s English: Form to Function Analyses (Abingdon: Routledge, 2025), where I discuss the two forms of the perfect, exploring arrive, become, come, fall, go, grow, and return, and show how come, fall, and go are relatively advanced in this shift in Benjamin Franklin’s English. A comparative discussion and summary are given in Section 4.2.4. (pp. 174-176) in the final chapter.
Progressive forms
Benjamin Franklin’s English: Form to Function Analyses (Abingdon: Routledge, 2025) includes some sections on progressive forms. The discussion is summarized in Section 4.2.3. (pp. 172-174), where it is shown that the use of the progressive of come and go is still very restricted in Benjamin Franklin’s English in the 18th century. It is more restricted with come than with go.
Also, my collaborative book entitled Pepysian Meditations on the Passion of Christ: Edited from Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125 (15th century) includes a section on the passive. The description is very short, but provides some interesting passive features, e.g. “[t]he entire text yields 188 examples of the passive, of which only ten include the agent of the verb”. When the agent is expressed, the preposition of (rather than by) is consistently used in this text. The section also notes that the indirect passive as in he was given … is not yet available in this 15th-century text. Instead, the type him was given … is still attested.
