The development of continuous tenses in modern English from the diachronic point of view

The article considers the questions of the origin and development of continuous tenses in modern English. The author researches various original sources of continuous forms in English and focuses on the noun-verb continuum. The diachronic development of continuous tenses is regarded as the reanalysis of the original nominal construction. The analogy can be the reason for including more types of verbs into the continuous tenses paradigm. The interpretation of functioning and frequency, characteristic of present-day continuous tenses, provides the possible explanation for on-going developments of continuous forms in modern English.