I would actually use "I'm liking it," specifically to mean that like 'I am beginning to like it' as in the progression of not liking it to liking it is still happening, or alternatively that the action being potentially liked is still ongoing and you've not made a decision yet. I think generally the difference would be that "I'm liking it" implies an uncertainty as to whether you will indeed like or not like it, whereas 'beginning to like it' implies to me that you've essentially already made up your mind but as the action is still ongoing there could possibly be something to prevent you from liking it, like hedging a bet. while interesting, I doubt McDonalds were the first to 'invent' this, it's much more likely I think for it to have already been a thing in colloquial or dialectal grammar that just eventually made its way into the written word, in this case via McDonalds and the one who first pitched the idea. I doubt they'd have just made it up for no reason, if it hadn't already felt natural to them to use it that way. Prescriptively it may have been forbidden, but prescriptivists also frequently make up horseshit about what a language is supposed to be anyways.
Mcdonald's advertising didn't change English grammar. It my have slightly normalised the phrase "I'm loving it", but not to the extent that it's used in everyday speech, and it hasn't destroyed the present stative/present progressive distinction. Even somebody who actually says "I'm loving" in some situations in real life, I bet they still differentiate between "I drink coffee" and "I'm drinking coffee", and I bet they don't go around expressing their love for people by saying "I'm loving you".
I agree. The present progressive is very much alive and well - "I love this pizza" and "I'm loving this pizza" have two very different connotations. My point is that verbs with stative lexical aspect (to love, to see, etc) can now take progressive inflection (I'm seeing it, I'm loving it, etc). If anything, the distinction between the present perfective "I love" and the present progressive "I'm loving" is stronger, not weaker.
@@babelingua "I love this pizza" sounds like you loved it and still enjoy it (In the non-future and possibly in the future) and "I'm loving this pizza" (The scope from remote past to current moment of speech) pass that all the yous in the remote past or present time love it and by implication that it wasn't an already existing preference since you were more specific when you could say the broader statement (It's not ambiguity where there are multiple meanings in one sentence that all could be something you'd say, that's how we distinguish metaphor from literal and ironic from sincerity, it's about being more general) which implies that you didn't say the broader statement because it wasn't completely true meaning it was a generalization and the more "narrows down" statement is 100% truthful and any statement that fits in the more general category BUUT not the more specific, is wrong. It possibly started as a way that the listener sacrifies .......like uuuuh maybe a bit off... to passing information more quickly or maybe to produce a sort of different effect like what happened with capitals in an internet written conversation where people may sacrifise the initital or in-proper-noun capitalization that don't serve a lot of stuff to write using certain intonation (WHAT THE HELL?? vs what the hell!? vs WHAT THE HELL vs what the hell vs What the hell) n it happens in article development too
@@computergician I didn't understand much of what you wrote. Basically the only context in which I would say "I'm loving this pizza" is if I were eating the pizza at the time, combining the normally stative verb "love" with a progressive action. You could also say "I love this pizza" in that context, or for example when you are not eating it, but you have eaten the same type of pizza before and you remember enjoying it, and you know you would enjoy it again.
@@babelingua thing is, different verbs always had different levels of rigidity in being stative or not. You still won't say "it's equaling five" in any context outside of "this machine gives numerical results but they're inconsistent in real time and we're specifically studying their inconsistencies".
My father hates phrases like "the dishes need washing" (vs "the dishes need to be washed") Can't say I ever gave it much thought before that, but thinking about it it does seem wrong to me.
That's interesting! From a descriptivist perspective, neither is wrong. "To be washed" passivises the sentence with a past participle. "Washing" emphasizes the act itself using a gerund.
?! But washing is an activity (eg. "washing up"). Beforehand, they were unwashed, & after they are washed, but the process of washing takes a nonzero amount of time (eg. "I am washing the dishes [right now]" or "I was washing the dishes when..."). So the sentence "The dishes need washing [to be done upon them] [by me]" is perfectly grammatically correct. Yes, it is in passive voice (although incidentally it still kind works in active voice: "I should be washing the dishes right now"), but passive voice isn't ungrammatical, it's just considering bad form for certain types of essays. The only thing worse than being pedantic is being pedantic and *wrong.*
@@aformofmatter8913 Is it really being pedantic when you have to clarify how it's "correct" by overdoubling the words in the sentence? Besides, who said it was wrong? I said it seems wrong, and I never said anything about my father thinking it was wrong 🙃
In German, which doesn't have (grammaticalized) aspect at all, they just went with "Ich liebe es". Which is a lot less memorable since it's about the plainest, most straightforward way of expressing that sentiment.
Funny things, most of the native German speakers I know tend to always use the progressive in English (and Spanish) even when it's not needed, or even ambiguous. I wonder if that's just because they don't recognize the distinction or due to some subconsciously fueled necessity to partake in that which is normally lacking in their tense prison.
huh, phrases like "I'm knowing that [X] is true" and "this sum, 2 + 3, is equaling 5" and more verbs like that are actually pretty common in my dialect (Indian English), didn't even notice it would seem strange in other dialects
I don't care about the use of "lovin' it," and never once thought it to be somehow grammatically incorrect, certainly not in any major way, but I DO hate the all-lower-case and lack of end punctuation. Call me prescriptivist if you must, but that shit just ain't alright.
This was a fun video. But as a black person from the southern United States who's been speaking some form of AAVE for their entire life --that just how we be doing it 💬
When the slogan first came out, I just assumed they were co-opting AAVE to sound desirable and increase the intensity of the good feelings McDonald's is supposed to give you. Emphasis and coolness.
FWIW, Kronk uttered the line, "I am loving this!" back in 2000's "The Emperor's New Groove." So the usage was probably already on the ascent at that point.0
And most varieties of Subcontinental English have no problems with using progressive aspect on stative verbs; in fact, "I'm knowing it" is perfectly fine to say in the Indian subcontinent.
I liked this video and I learned something new. I will say something about the “narrator” character is really creepy. I think the oversized hands and perpetually smiling, too small face invokes something monstrous.
One thing that I almost immediately thought (after predicting it was the progressive aspect but maybe we don't count that) is that, living in the UK, I've heard a ton of "I'll be having that" (which works a bit more like "Gimme!" with varying levels of politeness unless there's no person whom you might try to force into giving you something (or no waiter around)), & interestingly, while the "McDonald's progressive" - if I can call it that - may be more common among younger generations (not that I've heard it much oops), the "be having" progressive is almost exclusively for middle-aged and above people, often older men. Prescriptivists who think most anti-prescription occurs almost solely from the younger generation, take that!
I know it's a joke here, but I wish more people (on whatever side of whatever argument) would see prescriptivism and descriptivism as both simply being tools with respective appropriate use cases. Rigid prescription of language is very useful in industrial communication, game development, and customer service, for example.
Personally I think that prescriptivism and descriptivism are better used specifically as linguistic terms for attitudes about language that authorities in the matter, whether proper authority or self-given, may have. The whole point is to describe how say a linguist may treat a language, either as something that just is in one particular way and that everybody else must follow, or as something that is what its speakers have it as. In the first case, prescriptivism, it's just unscientific and honestly unethical. The other, descriptivism, is just what linguistics is supposed to be as a proper science. Outside of that narrow context, neither term properly fits. They're not tools that have uses, they're just descriptions of particular stances within linguistics, one of which is older and now outdated and the other which is the modern paradigm. Customer service? Not applicable. Game development? Not applicable. Industrial communication? Neither of those terms fit these contexts, as nobody in them is going to be treated as an authority over what language is or isn't supposed to be just by dint of that context by the speakers of the language overall or in any other kind of systemic way.
@@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410 How dare you dictate to me what words mean! lol jk A specific example of what I refer to is the rules text of a complex game like Magic the Gathering. In the construction of the rules text and card text, exact language is prescribed so as to ensure consistent functionality and understanding of that functionality. The authority in charge of this prescription has taken an attitude that it is necessary, whereas at the inception of the game no such unified rules for nomenclature and grammar existed. Perhaps this doesn't strictly qualify as "prescriptivism" because it's not an attitude towards language itself in an academic linguistic context. Perhaps, ironically, the colloquial use of the terms has skunked them lol
Yes, that's what I was arguing for pretty much, that last bit of yours. I'd not call that prescriptivism, or even being prescriptive to be honest. That's a game developer being clear and defining terms in the context of their game. They're not saying that this or that word can only mean this or that meaning in every single context of the language and that somebody is wrong to use it otherwise, if they were then that wouldn't be game development at all, that would be assuming authority over language that was unwarranted and then making an untrue claim about the language in question. That'd be an example prescriptivism. Outside of pop linguistic spaces, the 'argument' of prescriptivism vs descriptivism largely doesn't exist. There's a tendency I think of people in certain internet spaces to assume that stuff that goes on in that space is something that is widespread outside of that space. The whole prescriptivist vs descriptivist thing isn't so much an argument or any wide spread thing as much as it is a conservative aspect of pop linguistics that just hasn't died out yet. It's only in spaces like this that you find people arguing about it, or more normally actually just people defending prescriptivism, since for the most part in my experience you don't tend to see too much pro-prescriptivism stuff anywhere else other than pop linguistic spaces, whereas descriptivism is treated as a default by most people, especially the ones who actually build the space in the first place like youtubers and whatnot, likely as they're more exposed to proper linguistic research than their viewers. To clarify a point of my previous comment, when I'm saying 'authority,' I'm not meaning authority in general. A game developer is a rightful authority over their game, as they're the one making it. When I'm saying authority, I'm referring to the authority over matters dealing with language that people in general give linguists and other people associated with it. By going to school, getting high degrees, writing research papers, whathaveyou you are becoming an academic and people give academics authority over their specialisation, and often way too much authority over matters more broadly which is a large problem. Because of this, one needs to be careful of what they're doing and saying because if they're not careful they can very easily spread misinformation, among other things. It's this authority, power, that makes prescriptivism an issue in the first place and also why the terms don't have much use outside of this narrow context.
@@pbrown7501 yeah, i must disagree because with all those examples the responsibility rests on the speakers much more so than the listeners. it is fine to specify and clarify, but it seems abhorrent to me to think that any one entity should be allowed to declare an interpretation of words as invalid. both speaker and listener (and analogous parties in other media) have responsibilities in any communication, and people or companies or nations shirking responsibility by just declaring "that's not what i/we meant" is very disconcerting.
@@Errenium Within the context of a game such as a complex card game, interpretation of the rules text in a way other than intended would lead to problems in tournaments. In industrial communication, if the reader of a text fails to understand it despite that text following predefined industry-wide rules made available to them, costly mistakes may be made. Maybe that's different from what you're talking about, but within specific contexts like this, anything other than what the relevant authority has made available as the official definition of the words for that context is an "invalid interpretation" simply because it's not functional. It requires correction.
Was Whorf a prescriptivist or was he uncredible? I didn't catch the joke of his picture flashing for a frame. Btw as somebody who has English as his second language, I think that there is a place for prescriptivism when it comes to learning a foreign language. I would never correct another Slovene person speaking Slovene, but I will correct their English, since sometimes they don't speak the meaning they wanted to convey.
In general, they are, Half the time they've literally trtried to force languyages into tiny dead boxes (see Latinists for English, or how much La Academie hates Quebecois), instead of realizing that they're great when working on Latin Parchments from the 1200s, bu utter crap (or assholes) for trying the same things on a still evolving, living language.
You don’t have a lot of attention now but with this level of editing and effort you have a lot of potential
Dude. Your editing is so good.
Thanks! I've been sick, so I spent an unhealthy amount of time on this video.
@@babelingua Hope you're well now. Excellent video, looking forward to more.
holy shit it's corner quimy
I would actually use "I'm liking it," specifically to mean that like 'I am beginning to like it' as in the progression of not liking it to liking it is still happening, or alternatively that the action being potentially liked is still ongoing and you've not made a decision yet.
I think generally the difference would be that "I'm liking it" implies an uncertainty as to whether you will indeed like or not like it, whereas 'beginning to like it' implies to me that you've essentially already made up your mind but as the action is still ongoing there could possibly be something to prevent you from liking it, like hedging a bet.
while interesting, I doubt McDonalds were the first to 'invent' this, it's much more likely I think for it to have already been a thing in colloquial or dialectal grammar that just eventually made its way into the written word, in this case via McDonalds and the one who first pitched the idea. I doubt they'd have just made it up for no reason, if it hadn't already felt natural to them to use it that way. Prescriptively it may have been forbidden, but prescriptivists also frequently make up horseshit about what a language is supposed to be anyways.
I'm liking where this is going
Mcdonald's advertising didn't change English grammar. It my have slightly normalised the phrase "I'm loving it", but not to the extent that it's used in everyday speech, and it hasn't destroyed the present stative/present progressive distinction. Even somebody who actually says "I'm loving" in some situations in real life, I bet they still differentiate between "I drink coffee" and "I'm drinking coffee", and I bet they don't go around expressing their love for people by saying "I'm loving you".
I agree. The present progressive is very much alive and well - "I love this pizza" and "I'm loving this pizza" have two very different connotations. My point is that verbs with stative lexical aspect (to love, to see, etc) can now take progressive inflection (I'm seeing it, I'm loving it, etc). If anything, the distinction between the present perfective "I love" and the present progressive "I'm loving" is stronger, not weaker.
@@babelingua "I love this pizza" sounds like you loved it and still enjoy it (In the non-future and possibly in the future) and "I'm loving this pizza" (The scope from remote past to current moment of speech) pass that all the yous in the remote past or present time love it and by implication that it wasn't an already existing preference since you were more specific when you could say the broader statement (It's not ambiguity where there are multiple meanings in one sentence that all could be something you'd say, that's how we distinguish metaphor from literal and ironic from sincerity, it's about being more general) which implies that you didn't say the broader statement because it wasn't completely true meaning it was a generalization and the more "narrows down" statement is 100% truthful and any statement that fits in the more general category BUUT not the more specific, is wrong. It possibly started as a way that the listener sacrifies .......like uuuuh maybe a bit off... to passing information more quickly or maybe to produce a sort of different effect like what happened with capitals in an internet written conversation where people may sacrifise the initital or in-proper-noun capitalization that don't serve a lot of stuff to write using certain intonation (WHAT THE HELL?? vs what the hell!? vs WHAT THE HELL vs what the hell vs What the hell) n it happens in article development too
@@computergician I didn't understand much of what you wrote. Basically the only context in which I would say "I'm loving this pizza" is if I were eating the pizza at the time, combining the normally stative verb "love" with a progressive action. You could also say "I love this pizza" in that context, or for example when you are not eating it, but you have eaten the same type of pizza before and you remember enjoying it, and you know you would enjoy it again.
@@babelingua thing is, different verbs always had different levels of rigidity in being stative or not. You still won't say "it's equaling five" in any context outside of "this machine gives numerical results but they're inconsistent in real time and we're specifically studying their inconsistencies".
@@bacicinvatteneaca Yes this because if X = Y, than always X = Y regardless of time
My father hates phrases like "the dishes need washing" (vs "the dishes need to be washed") Can't say I ever gave it much thought before that, but thinking about it it does seem wrong to me.
That's interesting! From a descriptivist perspective, neither is wrong. "To be washed" passivises the sentence with a past participle. "Washing" emphasizes the act itself using a gerund.
That's fine. The horror is "the dishes need washed".
?!
But washing is an activity (eg. "washing up"). Beforehand, they were unwashed, & after they are washed, but the process of washing takes a nonzero amount of time (eg. "I am washing the dishes [right now]" or "I was washing the dishes when...").
So the sentence "The dishes need washing [to be done upon them] [by me]" is perfectly grammatically correct. Yes, it is in passive voice (although incidentally it still kind works in active voice: "I should be washing the dishes right now"), but passive voice isn't ungrammatical, it's just considering bad form for certain types of essays.
The only thing worse than being pedantic is being pedantic and *wrong.*
@@aformofmatter8913 Is it really being pedantic when you have to clarify how it's "correct" by overdoubling the words in the sentence?
Besides, who said it was wrong? I said it seems wrong, and I never said anything about my father thinking it was wrong 🙃
"Some should wash the dishes"
I love the character you use, it's quite unique and his giant arms are so expressive ! Keep up, the good work !
@cucaracho99 padada taah, padada taah
Glorious
Agreed
I'm out there Jerry and I'm loving every minute of it!!!
As some other commenters have pointed out: this is not new to McDonald's ad campaign. AAE has the habitual be, which is closely connected to this.
In German, which doesn't have (grammaticalized) aspect at all, they just went with "Ich liebe es".
Which is a lot less memorable since it's about the plainest, most straightforward way of expressing that sentiment.
Ich bins am lieben
Funny things, most of the native German speakers I know tend to always use the progressive in English (and Spanish) even when it's not needed, or even ambiguous. I wonder if that's just because they don't recognize the distinction or due to some subconsciously fueled necessity to partake in that which is normally lacking in their tense prison.
huh, phrases like "I'm knowing that [X] is true" and "this sum, 2 + 3, is equaling 5" and more verbs like that are actually pretty common in my dialect (Indian English), didn't even notice it would seem strange in other dialects
I am in the process of loving it
_"direct object"_
Very well put together!
I love the little character with all the arms
I don't care about the use of "lovin' it," and never once thought it to be somehow grammatically incorrect, certainly not in any major way, but I DO hate the all-lower-case and lack of end punctuation. Call me prescriptivist if you must, but that shit just ain't alright.
settle down, alright
This was a fun video. But as a black person from the southern United States who's been speaking some form of AAVE for their entire life --that just how we be doing it 💬
When the slogan first came out, I just assumed they were co-opting AAVE to sound desirable and increase the intensity of the good feelings McDonald's is supposed to give you. Emphasis and coolness.
Great interesting video, good job
As someone who learnt english from internet idea of "loving" being wrong is absurd for me. Knowing and liking is also obvious
FWIW, Kronk uttered the line, "I am loving this!" back in 2000's "The Emperor's New Groove." So the usage was probably already on the ascent at that point.0
And most varieties of Subcontinental English have no problems with using progressive aspect on stative verbs; in fact, "I'm knowing it" is perfectly fine to say in the Indian subcontinent.
I’m “loving” it
I liked this video and I learned something new. I will say something about the “narrator” character is really creepy. I think the oversized hands and perpetually smiling, too small face invokes something monstrous.
One thing that I almost immediately thought (after predicting it was the progressive aspect but maybe we don't count that) is that, living in the UK, I've heard a ton of "I'll be having that" (which works a bit more like "Gimme!" with varying levels of politeness unless there's no person whom you might try to force into giving you something (or no waiter around)), & interestingly, while the "McDonald's progressive" - if I can call it that - may be more common among younger generations (not that I've heard it much oops), the "be having" progressive is almost exclusively for middle-aged and above people, often older men. Prescriptivists who think most anti-prescription occurs almost solely from the younger generation, take that!
Who was in the portrait that flashed onscreen when you said "credible linguists" at around 2:54?
And a linguist might be prescriptivist anyway even if he can describe how language is actually used.
I was born *way* before this slogan became a thing and I've never seen anything wrong with it. Maybe it was always in my regional dialect?
I know it's a joke here, but I wish more people (on whatever side of whatever argument) would see prescriptivism and descriptivism as both simply being tools with respective appropriate use cases. Rigid prescription of language is very useful in industrial communication, game development, and customer service, for example.
Personally I think that prescriptivism and descriptivism are better used specifically as linguistic terms for attitudes about language that authorities in the matter, whether proper authority or self-given, may have. The whole point is to describe how say a linguist may treat a language, either as something that just is in one particular way and that everybody else must follow, or as something that is what its speakers have it as. In the first case, prescriptivism, it's just unscientific and honestly unethical. The other, descriptivism, is just what linguistics is supposed to be as a proper science.
Outside of that narrow context, neither term properly fits.
They're not tools that have uses, they're just descriptions of particular stances within linguistics, one of which is older and now outdated and the other which is the modern paradigm.
Customer service? Not applicable. Game development? Not applicable. Industrial communication? Neither of those terms fit these contexts, as nobody in them is going to be treated as an authority over what language is or isn't supposed to be just by dint of that context by the speakers of the language overall or in any other kind of systemic way.
@@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410 How dare you dictate to me what words mean! lol jk
A specific example of what I refer to is the rules text of a complex game like Magic the Gathering. In the construction of the rules text and card text, exact language is prescribed so as to ensure consistent functionality and understanding of that functionality. The authority in charge of this prescription has taken an attitude that it is necessary, whereas at the inception of the game no such unified rules for nomenclature and grammar existed.
Perhaps this doesn't strictly qualify as "prescriptivism" because it's not an attitude towards language itself in an academic linguistic context. Perhaps, ironically, the colloquial use of the terms has skunked them lol
Yes, that's what I was arguing for pretty much, that last bit of yours. I'd not call that prescriptivism, or even being prescriptive to be honest.
That's a game developer being clear and defining terms in the context of their game. They're not saying that this or that word can only mean this or that meaning in every single context of the language and that somebody is wrong to use it otherwise, if they were then that wouldn't be game development at all, that would be assuming authority over language that was unwarranted and then making an untrue claim about the language in question. That'd be an example prescriptivism.
Outside of pop linguistic spaces, the 'argument' of prescriptivism vs descriptivism largely doesn't exist.
There's a tendency I think of people in certain internet spaces to assume that stuff that goes on in that space is something that is widespread outside of that space.
The whole prescriptivist vs descriptivist thing isn't so much an argument or any wide spread thing as much as it is a conservative aspect of pop linguistics that just hasn't died out yet.
It's only in spaces like this that you find people arguing about it, or more normally actually just people defending prescriptivism, since for the most part in my experience you don't tend to see too much pro-prescriptivism stuff anywhere else other than pop linguistic spaces, whereas descriptivism is treated as a default by most people, especially the ones who actually build the space in the first place like youtubers and whatnot, likely as they're more exposed to proper linguistic research than their viewers.
To clarify a point of my previous comment, when I'm saying 'authority,' I'm not meaning authority in general. A game developer is a rightful authority over their game, as they're the one making it.
When I'm saying authority, I'm referring to the authority over matters dealing with language that people in general give linguists and other people associated with it. By going to school, getting high degrees, writing research papers, whathaveyou you are becoming an academic and people give academics authority over their specialisation, and often way too much authority over matters more broadly which is a large problem.
Because of this, one needs to be careful of what they're doing and saying because if they're not careful they can very easily spread misinformation, among other things. It's this authority, power, that makes prescriptivism an issue in the first place and also why the terms don't have much use outside of this narrow context.
@@pbrown7501 yeah, i must disagree because with all those examples the responsibility rests on the speakers much more so than the listeners. it is fine to specify and clarify, but it seems abhorrent to me to think that any one entity should be allowed to declare an interpretation of words as invalid. both speaker and listener (and analogous parties in other media) have responsibilities in any communication, and people or companies or nations shirking responsibility by just declaring "that's not what i/we meant" is very disconcerting.
@@Errenium Within the context of a game such as a complex card game, interpretation of the rules text in a way other than intended would lead to problems in tournaments. In industrial communication, if the reader of a text fails to understand it despite that text following predefined industry-wide rules made available to them, costly mistakes may be made.
Maybe that's different from what you're talking about, but within specific contexts like this, anything other than what the relevant authority has made available as the official definition of the words for that context is an "invalid interpretation" simply because it's not functional. It requires correction.
babelingua is a cryptocommie or cryptosocialist and i'm here for it.
Was Whorf a prescriptivist or was he uncredible? I didn't catch the joke of his picture flashing for a frame.
Btw as somebody who has English as his second language, I think that there is a place for prescriptivism when it comes to learning a foreign language. I would never correct another Slovene person speaking Slovene, but I will correct their English, since sometimes they don't speak the meaning they wanted to convey.
I'm disappointed with the failure of this video to end with Rick Astley.
i have always wondered what tf does "i'm still loving you" in the scorpions song mean
i'm likin' this video
I'm knowing this!
"all credible linguists are descriptivists, not prescriptivists"
That's a very prescriptivist perspective.
Shakespeare didn't invent half the English lexicon, he was just the first guy to write a whole load of words down
Yeah, it was just a joke
:- D
Descriptivists are just prescriptivists who think that only they, not anyone else, are imbued with the divine right to decide what is correct
th-cam.com/video/tmbj6NcmdlU/w-d-xo.html
Prescriptivists aren't assholes.
In general, they are, Half the time they've literally trtried to force languyages into tiny dead boxes (see Latinists for English, or how much La Academie hates Quebecois), instead of realizing that they're great when working on Latin Parchments from the 1200s, bu utter crap (or assholes) for trying the same things on a still evolving, living language.