"Me iba atropellando": la presencia de la inminencia fallida en la América hispanohablante

The presence of the periphrasis ir plus gerund in simple past with the meaning of failed imminence has been widely attested in the Spanish-speaking America. Thus, a speaker conveys "él me iba atropellando" (lit. ‘he was running me over’) as a synonym to "él casi me atropella" (‘he was about to run me over’). However, there are very few studies that delimit the geographical area in which it occurs. For this reason, we have extracted the data from corpus PRESEEA and an "ad hoc" survey, in order to determine more precisely the regions where this phenomenon emerges and to examine those in which it is beginning to arise, in addition to assessing different sociolinguistic issues. The results suggest a non-prestigious innovation that starts spreading throughout the Southern Cone and which depends upon the "Aktionsart".