I’m loving it! A Corpus-Based Study of the Progress of love

Abstract

The English progressive construction is thriving. Even stative verbs, traditionally considered incompatible with the be+- ing form, are being increasingly used in the progressive. To fully understand these emerging uses of the so-called “progressive states,” we must consider the syntactic elements of the construction and the meaning and pragmatics of the so-called “stative” verb. In this paper, I perform a large-scale corpus analysis of love in the progressive (e.g., “I’m loving your blog!”) to investigate the new functions of this construction. My data confirm a tendency toward colloquialization (Mair & Hundt 1995; Mair 1997; Smitterberg 2005; Leech et al. 2009; Collins 2013; Levin 2013) and suggest an ongoing shift toward a more grammatical status. The core phenomenal meaning of the progressive construction and its heavy reliance on contextual information promotes the extension of the be- loving construction to a greater number of contexts and functions, including more subjective readings, which is missing in the corresponding non-progressive construction.