What is Love?

This week we had a couple of out-of-town visitors staying with us, including The Wife's cousin Cera.  One night we were all watching the TV show Hit Me Baby One More Time, on which has-been artists perform their one big hit and also cover a new song.  One of the artists was Haddaway, who sang his unforgettable "What is Love?", and it got me thinking about the lyrics.  I said, "What does this song even mean, anyway?  He asks his baby 'What is love?' and then asks her not to hurt him any more?  Is she beating him or something?"

Cera had a different interpretation.

She said (half kidding, I think), "No, no—he's saying 'what is love' doesn't hurt him any more."  Ah, interesting!  In that interpretation, the title phrase is a nominalized relative serving as the subject of the sentence.  It's not possible to distinguish between these two readings because rock and disco lyrics are usually in a sort of pseudo-AAVE dialect that neutralizes imperative don't and declarative third-person singular doesn't—both have the form don't.  Here are two standard English paraphrases that capture the difference:

(1) What is love?  Baby, don't hurt me any more.
(2) That which is love, baby, doesn't hurt me any more.

Which of these, then, did Haddaway really intend?  It's hard to tell.  He was apparently born in Trinidad but raised in Cologne, Germany (which explains why we also had a lot of trouble placing his accent), so he's probably not a native speaker of AAVE, and that might argue for (1), since (2) requires the AAVE neutralization.  However, Haddaway probably (like many white artists—think Mick Jagger) adopts AAVE for song lyrics because it's a convention of the genre, which puts us back to square one.  The only thing that might give us a clue as to which interpretation he intended is the title of the song, which (at least on Amazon) includes a question mark, which suggests that (1) above is what he meant.  But only he knows for sure...

[Now playing:  what do you think?]