The death of the non-continuous verb

[robinturner]

Some years ago, I wrote a paper entitled The Strange Case of the "Non-continuous Verb" in which I criticised the practice of creating an artificial class of "stative" or "non-continuous" verbs which should not be used with the continuous/progressive aspect, or worse, "do not take the -ing form" -- verbs like love, believe, prefer, know and so forth. With my customary glee in exposing linguistic myths, I provided examples like "Been lovin' you too long" (B.B. King) for almost all of these so-called "non-continuous verbs", arguing that rather than having a class of stative verbs, English has a stative sense, and some verbs are generally, but by no means exclusively, employed this sense. The only verbs for which I was unable to find authentic examples were "know" (except in the Biblical sense) and "believe".

Anyway, the same question came up yesterday, posed by my wife, who is trying to brush up her English grammar in preparation for a conference (Turkish does not make this active/stative distinction). Attempting to explain why certain verbs tended not to be found in the Present Continuous tense, I gave the example of "believe", thinking I was on pretty safe ground. "After all," I said, "you wouldn't believe something now in the anticipation that you would not believe it later."

We then settled down to watch Get Real, that heart-warming saga of tangled teen relationships and mangled English usage. As if by synchronicity, Meghan says:

"I am so not believing that!"

The non-continuous verb is officially dead.

Comments

[solri.livejournal.com]

And in similar vein, I am so not liking marking midterms.

Am I finally getting the hang of this American English thang?

Query for linguists: is this

I am so [not] verb-ing

structure common throughout US English? Or is it just californian? Or just teen?

[ex-fauxpas266.livejournal.com]

Your American English is all right, but we wouldn't say "marking," we'd say "grading."

As a 20-something Californian, the "I am so [not] verb-ing" structure is very common and normal-sounding to me. But I don't get out of the state much, nor do I talk to very many non-20-somethings much.

[gerrard28.livejournal.com]

Did you actually wrote a paper on that? I find it very interesting and yes, I'll admit that I didn't give much thought to that active/stative verbs, it's quite difficult to set a difference when you're not a native English speaker. I am actually still having sat tutoring online (http://private-sat-tutor.blogspot.com/2009/06/sat-private-tutor.html) classes, there's still room for improvement in my case.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Yes, I wrote it, and it was published on a miniscule scale. Come to think of it, I should scan it and out it online. (The original is on a 5 1/4 inch floppy, so scanning the print version would probably be easier than trying to read the file, even if I could find it.