The spellings gonna , gotta , and wanna , on the other hand, do not preserve the shape of the words they represent. They are not contractions, but reductions. A linguistic reduction is the result of relaxed pronunciation.
All speakers of all languages slur sounds and words together. Doing so is a normal part of spoken language. The more informal the situation, the more slurring goes on. Speakers who are sensitive to the needs of others will speak more carefully in some situations than in others. For example, teenagers who barely move their lips when speaking to one another may be expected to enunciate in the classroom.
Courteous native speakers will take the trouble to pronounce words carefully when speaking to non-native speakers. Any English speaker who has received a formal education of ten years or more may be expected to speak clearly when being interviewed on television.
Reductions are not unknown in print. Until recently, however, such spellings were not commonly seen outside of fiction. Gonna and gotta are not unexpected in song lyrics and on social media like Facebook, but now they are creeping into news coverage. Here are some examples from transcripts and quotations that have appeared on news sites:. Professional writers especially might be expected to avoid nonstandard usage and spelling, but the evidence on Amazon is that for many authors, gonna , gotta , wanna , and even whatcha and coulda are acceptable written English.
Whatcha Gonna Do with that Duck? Coulda Been a Cowboy. Time will be the judge. An Ngram search shows that the use of gonna in printed books has risen dramatically since the s, and gotta and wanna are making a little progress. Meanwhile, their use does not reflect well on writers who wish to be taken seriously.
Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! As far as the titles go, I have no problem with such things in popular literature. Also note that, unlike normal contractions, we do not always use apostrophes ' with informal contractions when written. Listed below are some common informal contractions, with example sentences.
Note that the example sentences may be a little artificial because when we use a contraction we may also use other contractions in the same sentence, or even drop some words completely. For example:. The following song may not be appropriate for some ages and audiences.
Please preview before using in class. Whatcha doin' tonight, baby? I kinda like your style, lady. Maybe this is transcription error, not sure. I was an undergraduate at Oxford in the s, studying Modern Languages, and remember one of my lecturers in the History of the French Language course speaking of the new English auxiliaries "gonna" and "gotta".
Did he call them modal auxiliaries? I can't remember, but I think probably he should have. He may also have mentioned "wanna".
If the quote came froma Rolling Stone article, it may have come from this month's September issue. It is out in newsstands on Sept. That same lecturer left us with a question to think about, and I've never found an answer. The question was: "English prose is steeped in the Bible.
What is French prose steeped in? Thanks, Alice, for pointing out that January Jones was the source of the quote. Her character, Betty, is excruciatingly stiff in her diction; that might have been all she meant.
Don, try as he might, can't help betraying his humble origins from time to time, explicitly or linguistically. Over the course of the story, he role-plays as a surgeon, military hero, etc.
I became an advertising copywriter in on Michigan Avenue in Chicago at a branch of the coutry's oldest agency, N. As counselors of what sells, we maintained a level of education, decorum, and Standard English.
We studied the vernacular, of course, and often ccalled for it in radio and TV spots, but we were above that in the office. To this day, I've heard students tell me that they wouldn't dare say things like "gonna" or "shoulda" or "'n'" or "th'" or… in front of a professor. Those students are rare, and some although not all are international students, but I've definitely head such pronouncements. Five minutes later, of course, they say exactly those things and so does the professor, because virtually no American will say "I.
Self-reporting is notoriously unreliable. I've heard people swear they say thee before any word beginning with a vowel, when five minutes with a tape recorder proved they almost never did. I'd take any person's claim that they never said 'gonna' with more than a grain of salt; it's not "slang", it's normal pronunciation. September 11, am.
We're talking about Madison Avenue in the era that produced "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should"? The air comes out through the nose.
The back of the tongue presses back, and again, the air comes out through the nose. The tongue is tense. I don't for a moment think that the creators of Mad Men are attempting to reproduce the way people actually spoke in the 60s — no TV show tries to reproduce the way people actually speak, it's always a cleaned-up, streamlined version, devoid of most speech errors, hesitations, repetitions, construction that would be too unfamiliar to the majority audience, and so on and so forth.
What Mad Men is trying to do I assume is find a way of indicating that speech, like dress, was, in certain settings, more formal than it is today, and they think that avoiding constuctions like "gonna" is an effective way of conveying that formality. They aren't aiming for an authenticity that would convince a sixties audience, they're aiming for a particular effect on a modern audience.
September 11, pm. We tend always to find out the mistakes only in the spoken language and never in the written language. Nobody thinks that the written language has ever been wrong in some concepts, or ever would be wrong,or even some recast that come from the spoken language maybe would be a right option for the future written language.
The mouth has some phonetics rules that maybe years ago were unknown. We always tend to find out the mistakes only in the spoken language and never in the written language. The mouth has some phonetic rules that maybe years ago were unknown. I'd have thought that speech in the s was more regionalized than today, especially given the effects of TV and population movements since that time. A question I've long had is: Do dropped letters and contracted forms exist in other languages?
It seems so many English-language usage questions revolve around these issues: g-dropping so-called , h-dropping by Cockneys and others, rhotic vs. Are there languages where people complain about m-dropping or p-dropping or! The answer to both questions is "yes", but there are more of the former than the latter. Of course it's true in English as well that only a small fraction of lenition or deletion phenomena are stigmatized.
Clarissa: "Not Standard American English" is a bit of a stretch. Just because someone says "going to" which I agree few people do consistently all the time, but at the same time few people never use the full form at all doesn't mean he or she pauses portentously between every word as your example does.
Similar variations exist in the pronunciation of Maori, but the differences are regional and there's little complaining about them that I know of.
In parts of the South Island, "ng" became "k", so the place name Aorangi cloud in the sky is so spelt in the North Island, but is Aoraki in the South. There are similar regional variations in the pronunciation of "wh": as [f], as [w], as [hw], and possibly even as something else in some places. The spelling and pronunciation of the place name W[h]anganui has become controversial in recent years. The correct spelling, and the only meaningful one in Maori, is Whanganui big harbour but the traditional Pakeha spelling is without the h.
As it happens, the Whanganui tribes pronounce "wh" as [w]. I would still be curious to hear specific examples of these deletions in other languages. I appreciate Xmun's reply, but I'm not speaking so much of recognized dialectal differences as cases where speakers pronounce the same word differently based on the formality of the situation.
I can distinctly remember using different modes of speech for home and school when I was in primary school. At school I used more formal language, and at home more colloquial, 'g'-dropping, etc.
One variation I haven't seen much discussion of is "gonnu. Now, obviously there is little if any documentation for this word, as opposed to the massive textual evidence for "gonna," but I suspect it is almost as old. I'm not quite sure what the distinction is in meaning between the two. September 12, am. I'm not going to! There's also Southern US "gone" — "I'm gone come back tomorrow" — which can be further abbreviated to "I'm own" — "I'm own come back tomorrow".
But a more puzzling form is "I'm a-gonna" or "I'm a-gone". There's an "a-" sometimes used for the a present habitual — "He's a-whittlin'" — which is a survival of a Middle English formation like "yclept".
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