The state of stative verbs

or why I've stopped teaching them (and why you shouldn't bother with them either)

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Like for many EFL/ESL teachers, stative verbs used to be a staple of my teaching menu. I had a great activity for focusing on them, which I have abandoned because I've come to realise that it served no purpose.



The activity, which I may have picked up on my CELTA or from Dave's ESL cafe (who remembers it?), went like this. Groups of 3-4 students (Pre-Intermediate level and up) are given a stack of cards with verbs written on them. They pick up the cards, in turns, and mime the verb for other students to guess. The correct guesser keeps the card and the one with most cards at the end is the winner. But the aim of the activity is not to review vocabulary. At the end of the miming / guessing part, students are asked which verbs were easy to mime and which ones proved a bit challenging, stretching the students' artistic resources. The "easy" ones are:

eat     drink   drive    sit     fall     pray     walk

And the difficult ones would be:

love     like    admire    want     understand     belong     consist      

Unbeknownst to learners, these 'difficult' ones are coloured in red, which helps during the next stage - clarification. After eliciting from students why they found the 'red' verbs difficult (they do not describe actions but refer to states), students are asked to sort them into sub-categories which can (but doesn't have to) be given in advance:

feelings ('heart' verbs): love, like, admire
thinking ('head' verbs): understand, realise
other: belong, own, consist

There is an opportunity for discussion here - my students would always end up debating whether "believe" should be in the 'heart' or the 'head' sub-category. Unfortunately that's about the only time learners get to produce any language in this activity, which is fun and engaging but involves almost no speaking apart from shouting out random, unrelated verbs in the infinitive. You may argue that it is a consciousness-raising rather than production activity. Whatever its aim, I've discarded it from my teaching repertoire and here's why you should consider following suit:

Stative vs. dynamic meanings

First of all, it would be more accurate to talk about stative vs dynamic meanings of certain verbs. Many so-called stative verbs have dynamic meanings, for example "see": She's seeing someone new (=dating)

In the same way, "think" has both stative and dynamic meanings:
(have an opinion): I think stative verbs are not a valid grammatical category. / What do you think?
(making plans): I'm thinking of buying a new laptop.

Surely we should look at many different meanings of a verb before assigning it in one fell swoop to an artificially created category. And artificial is what it is. Like with many pedagogical grammar rules, the stative / dynamic distinction was essentially imposed on what should be treated as vocabulary in the first place. The difference between stative and dynamic is semantic rather than structural (morphological or syntactic). Despite this obvious fact, many coursebooks and many teachers using them regard stative verbs as a grammatical category which deserves special treatment in the classroom. Why? Because - here comes the oft-repeated grammar mantra - stative verbs cannot be used in the progressive (continuous) form.

More 'exceptions' to the 'rule'

Even if you set aside all the dynamic senses of supposedly stative verbs described above, you will still find that it's perfectly acceptable to use many verbs denoting mental states and matters of the heart in the progressive:

I was hoping...
I've been wanting to do it
I'm sorry, I was forgetting that you would be away in August. (example from Cambridge Dictionary)
We are tending to use it more... (as heard in a talk by Penny Ur)
I just want to make sure I'm understanding what I'm reading (as heard in the film Erin Brockovich)


And examples like these are numerous. I have recently had a discussion with teachers in one of the Facebook groups, where almost every participant came up with an example in which an allegedly stative verb could be used in the progressive form. Interestingly, this didn't stop the participants from insisting that Stative verbs are a valid grammar point. Even if it was once - according to some earlier language descriptions, let's not forget that grammar is an abstraction, and grammar rules are an attempt to generalize over the dynamic, constantly evolving system that is language. But when so many examples from every day use contradict the made-up rule, perhaps the rule needs to be revised in line with the change in language use?

The progressive is on the rise

Clear evidence of this change comes from diachronic corpus research, i.e. study of language through collection of attested samples of language use through different periods in history. Corpus studies have shown that the progressive/continuous aspect has become more common in English since the late 17th century with the most notable rise in popularity in the second half of the 20th century - see Levin (2013) for overview. (I've already touched upon it once in the post entitled SLOPPY BRITS OR UPTIGHT AMERICANS). Some examples of the progressive aspect being used where a simple form would have probably been appropriate in the past are:

You're looking good! How have you been?  

I'm hating my job.

I'm guessing it'll take another day or two.

This increase in the use of the progressive can be attributed to a number of factors. One is the growing influence of World Englishes, particularly the varieties used in the countries of Kachru's Outer Circle, such as the Philippines, Singapore etc. Research shows (Collins 2008) that English speakers in the Outer Circle countries tend to be more innovative in the use of the progressive aspect often extending its use to new contexts. Added to that is the well-attested overuse of the progressive marking in learner English (Hundt & Vogel 2011), in other words among the speakers of English in the Expanding Circle.

The increased frequency of use of the progressive aspect also coincides with a trend towards colloquialization in written English with written language becoming more informal and adopting the conventions of spoken discourse (Levin 2013), in which the progressive form occurs more frequently. In addition to these reasons gleaned from the literature, I can't help but think that the increasing popularity of the progressive stems from the way we perceive today's world. The world we live in is becoming more and more fleeting and fast-paced, and, as a result, our perceptions of it more transient and temporary and, thus, better captured in the progressive aspect.

Finally, the widespread use of mobile phones also has a part to play in the process. Because of mobile phones we are more likely to report the events as they unfold. Twenty five years ago, the sentences such as I'm just getting into a cab or I'm just opening the door would be highly unlikely and seem contrived (unless they were used in the classroom - rather unnaturally - for the purposes of illustrating the Present Continuous). These days they are perfectly possible in text messages.

Certain words like certain grammar

'What are you looking for?'

One important point worth making in relation to stative verbs and their use in the progressive is that some verbs indeed show preference for a certain aspect - this has nothing to do with them being stative or dynamic. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as "colligation".

For example: "look for" tends to occur in the progressive whereas "found" being a telic verb, prefers simple forms.

What are you looking for? I'm looking for my car keys.

Declarative verbs do not normally occur as progressive verbs.

I admit I know very little about the subject.
I declare you man and wife (at a wedding)

With these verbs "the saying of the sentence is the action referred to" (Lewis, 1986:86). Further examples (ibid) are:

I propose a toast
I swear by almighty God... (the oath taken in court)

Drawing on an vast corpus of authentic English text, the The Longman Student's Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al 2002) identifies the following verbs commonly occurring with the progressive marking (more than 80% of the time):

bleed, chase, chat, joke, kid, moan, shop, starve

with bleed and starve almost always used in the progressive form (I'm starving).

On the contrary, verbs with instantaneous meanings almost never take the progressive, for example arrest or shrug (ibid., 163). Most importantly, the authors of this ground-breaking corpus-informed reference book confirm that the use of the progressive is not determined by stativity alone:

Many previous descriptions of progressive aspect describe it as occurring with dynamic verbs. However, it turns out that both dynamic verbs and stative verbs occur with the progressive. (ibid., 164)

Don't get into a state over stative verbs

It seems to me the whole notion of stative verbs was invented to prevent mistakes such as *He's owning the house or *I'm wanting it, but, honestly, how often have you heard students say that?! Like with many grammar points, this one tries to deal with something that doesn't pose a problem to begin with, but creates confusion after you have focused on it.

Yes, some English verbs have stative meanings, but why should they be elevated to a special status (to the exclusion of other categories, such as declarative or telic verbs - see above)? And why should we dwell on the stative vs dynamic distinction, which is too abstract and too imprecise to waste precious class time on? All verbs in English have their own inherent lexical aspectuality and, as such, are best dealt with lexically, by looking at their meanings as these meanings come up (like two different senses of think in the examples above). On the whole, stative verbs are one example of artificially created 'difficult grammar' areas which can be effectively addressed through more thorough teaching of vocabulary.

References

Biber, D., Conrad, S., Leech, G. N., Conrad, S., & Leech, G. N. (2002). Longman student grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.

Collins 1, P. (2008). The progressive aspect in World Englishes: A corpus-based study. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 28(2): 225-249.

Hundt, M., & Vogel, K. (2011). Overuse of the progressive in ESL and learner Englishes – fact or fiction? In J. Mukherjee & M. Hundt (Eds.), Exploring second-language varieties of English and learner Englishes: Bridging a paradigm gap (pp. 145–166). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Levin, M. (2013). The progressive verb in modern American English. In B. Aarts et al.(eds.),The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora (pp. 187-216). Cambridge: CUP

Lewis, M. (1986). The English verb: An exploration of structure and meaning. Language Teaching Publications.