%0 Journal Article %T I¡¯m loving it! A Corpus %A Montserrat Mart¨ªnez-V¨¢zquez %J Journal of English Linguistics %@ 1552-5457 %D 2018 %R 10.1177/0075424218765609 %X 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 %K Progressive %K states %K aspect %K colloquialization %K love %K American English %K language varieties %K corpus linguistics %K methodological approaches %U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0075424218765609