Both Dutch and Afrikaans display three periphrastic progressive constructions, which indicate that an action is going on at a particular moment of time: (i) a prepositional construction with aan het/ die + zijn/wees, (ii) a construction with posture verbs (zitten/staan/liggen) with a to-infinitive (Dutch) or a coordinating verb (Afrikaans) and (Hi) a construction with bezig/besigyo/Zowec/ by a to-infinitive (see, among others, Bertinetto, Ebert & De Groot 2000; Breed 2012; Donaldson 1993). This paper focuses on the latter of these constructions, which until now has only received little attention in the grammatical literature. In the instances in (1) below, the bezig/besig-construction is used to express that a volitional action is/was going on for a certain amount of time. (1a) Sowat elf brandweerwaens was tot in die vroeë oggendure nog besig om die brand te blus. (Die Burger, 12/01/1998) lit. "About eleven fire engines were busy extinguishing the fire until long into the night. " (1b) Brandweerlieden zijn druk bezig een man te bevrijden uit defel gehavende personen- wagen. (Gazet van Antwerpen, gva2) lit. "The firemen are busy rescuing a man from the heavily damaged car. " However, progressive besig can also be used to express ongoing processes which do not involve a volitional agent - as shown in (b), Dutch bezig is hardly an option in such contexts. (2a) 'n Groot chaos is besig om onder sy neus te ontwikkel. (Die Burger, 06/02/1998) (2b) ??Een grote chaos is bezig om zich voor zijn neus te ontwikkelen. lit. "A great chaos is busy developing right under his very nose. " (3a) Haar nuutste album is besig om goed te verkoop. (Die Burger, 06/02/1998) (3b) ??Haar nieuwste album is bezig om goed te verkopen. lit. "Her newest album is busy selling well. " The aim of this paper is to examine the use of this construction in detail from the perspective of the grammaticalization theory, based on corpus data from six Dutch and two Afrikaans newspapers. Firstly, we show that besig in Afrikaans is used more often in a ...