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.