The point is that love isn't just a linguistic phenomenon – it's some other internal phenomenon or experience that happens to cause linguistic expression (among other forms of expression or behavior modulation.)

Love is something we feel; words are evidence of it. We don't define love as a pattern that shows up in a series of conversations. There are many other ways of generating those same words.

Nobody's trying to reject materialism here. I myself happen to believe that love is nothing more than (or at least, can entirely be explained by) electrochemical processes in my brain. And I agree that that doesn't make love any less magical ^_^

I think by "correlating patterns", the person you're replying to meant "doing just enough processing to produce the salient performances". But it's possible to have additional "inner mental life" beyond the minimum that's necessary to give rise to an outward behavior. (In this case, the outward behavior is speech.) A single interface can have many different implementations, as it were.