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.

中文翻译：

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我喜欢这个！基于语料库的爱情进展研究

英语渐进式建筑蓬勃发展。甚至静态动词，传统上被认为与 be+-ing 形式不相容，现在也越来越多地用于进行时。为了充分理解所谓“进行状态”的这些新兴用法，我们必须考虑结构的句法元素以及所谓“静态”动词的含义和语用。在本文中，我对渐进式中的爱进行了大规模语料库分析（例如，“我爱你的博客！”）以研究这种结构的新功能。我的数据证实了一种口语化的趋势（Mair & Hundt 1995; Mair 1997; Smitterberg 2005; Leech et al. 2009; Collins 2013; Levin 2013），并表明正在向更加语法化的状态转变。