Love as a term of address in British English: micro-diachronic variation

This paper explores the pragmatic scope of the endearment ‘love’ in contemporary spoken British English. It will be suggested that the function of ‘love’ in interaction can be understood as a ritual framing expression that enables speakers to index certain interpersonal constellations and action contexts in which speakers claim rights and social authority by couching them in affective stance displays. The study is based on the 1994 and 2014 versions of the British National Corpus. The findings show that over the course of twenty years, the use of ‘love’ has become significantly less frequent and has undergone a functional profile shift to index, more centrally than before, other-deprecating evaluation, enacted through joking and performative use in storytelling. Those functions appear to feed off the core semantics and interpersonal constellations of ‘love’ as well as associations with social and linguistic stereotypes.