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From reduction to emancipation

Is gonna a word?

Abstract

In this paper I propose an emancipation effect that may follow from the ‘reducing effect’ of frequency (Bybee 2006): if a reduced realization of an item gains in frequency, it will become conceptually independent from the full form. In a context of grammaticalization, I show that this is the case for the form gonna, which is becoming emancipated from its source form going to. I use corpus data of spoken American English to trace the process of emancipation as gonna sheds off the features of phonetic reduction and acquires those of a lexical variant.

Abstract

In this paper I propose an emancipation effect that may follow from the ‘reducing effect’ of frequency (Bybee 2006): if a reduced realization of an item gains in frequency, it will become conceptually independent from the full form. In a context of grammaticalization, I show that this is the case for the form gonna, which is becoming emancipated from its source form going to. I use corpus data of spoken American English to trace the process of emancipation as gonna sheds off the features of phonetic reduction and acquires those of a lexical variant.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. List of contributors vii
  4. Introduction 1
  5. Sequence and order
  6. Sequence and order 13
  7. Mom and Dad but Men and Women 35
  8. Sequences of size adjectives in text 47
  9. Competing constructions
  10. The competition between the intensifiers dead and deadly 71
  11. Has go -V ousted go-and -V? 91
  12. The construction cannot help -ing and its rivals in Modern English 113
  13. From reduction to emancipation 133
  14. Complex prepositions and variation within the PNP construction 153
  15. Emerging patterns
  16. A finer definition of neology in English 177
  17. A corpus-based study of gender assignment in recent English loanwords in Norwegian 209
  18. The return of the prefix? New verb-particle combinations in blogs 223
  19. Correlating patterns and meaning
  20. Modality and the V wh pattern 247
  21. Assessing corpus search methods in onomasiological investigations 271
  22. Author index 293
  23. Subject index 297
Corpus Perspectives on Patterns of Lexis
This chapter is in the book Corpus Perspectives on Patterns of Lexis
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.57.11lor

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. List of contributors vii
  4. Introduction 1
  5. Sequence and order
  6. Sequence and order 13
  7. Mom and Dad but Men and Women 35
  8. Sequences of size adjectives in text 47
  9. Competing constructions
  10. The competition between the intensifiers dead and deadly 71
  11. Has go -V ousted go-and -V? 91
  12. The construction cannot help -ing and its rivals in Modern English 113
  13. From reduction to emancipation 133
  14. Complex prepositions and variation within the PNP construction 153
  15. Emerging patterns
  16. A finer definition of neology in English 177
  17. A corpus-based study of gender assignment in recent English loanwords in Norwegian 209
  18. The return of the prefix? New verb-particle combinations in blogs 223
  19. Correlating patterns and meaning
  20. Modality and the V wh pattern 247
  21. Assessing corpus search methods in onomasiological investigations 271
  22. Author index 293
  23. Subject index 297
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