I'm Gonna Tell You About Language

I'm Gonna Tell You About Language

Monday, March 5, 2012

How dare I use the monstrosity of letters arranged in such a way to reproduce a similar combination of sounds as to the words "going to" when read aloud in certain regional dialects of the United States! Surely, my typing device must have been inadequately supplied and the keys "I" and "T" must be situational to a fault!

On the other hand, did you understand what that word meant? Does comprehension of a group of letters constitute as a word? Could I have typed "ginog ot" and still maintained the same message?

Let's start with the first idea of "gonna". The word "gonna" has been created through a process of erosion. The best way to describe why erosion occurs is out of colloquial laziness. For instance, how many people will shorten the sentence of "Do you know what I mean?" to "You know?" or just 2 syllables as in "'na mean?". More historically, the word today came from "on this day", which was shortened in practice to "this day" and then finally "today". This is also apparent in other languages using their translation of the word "today". The purpose of erosion stems from wanting to convey the message quicker. It simply takes too long to say or type "on this day", so through a long process it has been socially and academically accepted to be shortened to "today". Back to the idea of "gonna", the word has created from the words "going to", which have been eroded because we'd like to convey the message of "going to" more quickly. This would mean "going to" and "gonna" have the same meaning, right? Take this example:

I'm going to walk to the store.
I'm gonna walk to the store.

Here, we've replaced "going to" with "gonna" and the sentence makes sense to our internal grammars, as much as you might cringe at reading a word missing from scholarly dictionaries. However, look at this next example.

I'm going to the store.
*I'm gonna the store.
(the asterisk is a common method of identifying when a word or phrase is ungrammatical)

Whoa, what happened here? The first example was fine, but now that we removed the manner at which we were going to the store. Suddenly, using "gonna" is ungrammatical. There's a few things that we should mention.

The word "to" holds a lot of properties that are being bounced around these examples. The first sentence in the first example uses the first "to" in conjunction with "walk" as the infinitive form of the verb (to walk). It's not actually associated with the word "going" directly. We could replace "going" with a number of words here (i.e.: planning, continuing, waiting etc.) but the main verb is "to walk". "Going" is helping the main verb to show the intent of walking.

In the first sentence of the second example, the word "to" is being used as a preposition to show direction and not in conjunction with a verb. We could replace "to" with a number of words here (i.e.: toward, past, around etc.) but the main verb is now "going" which is a progressive from of the verb "to go". We can also replace the verb here with other verbs (i.e.: running, drive, skipped etc.) which are all verbs with their own infinitive forms (i.e.: to run, to drive, to skip). Because "to gonna" is not a verb to which we may identify an action, the second sentence become ungrammatical.

So what is "gonna"? The word "gonna" is a version of an auxiliary verb, which just means that it helps another verb. To be more specific it is an auxiliary verb for future intent. Future intent verbs are defined by the progressive form; meaning your intent is an on-going action. Progressive forms require the "ing" suffix. By the transitive property of equality, this would mean than "gonna" requires the "ing" suffix. So, where is it?

It's in there and we know it because "gonna" was erode from "going to". The "to" part is essentially stolen from the "to walk" infinitive. We can remove future intent and infinitive forms entirely by saying "I walk to the store". However, with the future intent, the verb requires the infinitive form.

Do you wanna see some more?

Actually, let's finish by quickly touching on "ginog ot". Writing "I'm ginog ot tell you about language" may mean that my hand-brain coordination was off and I had forgotten to proof read. However, you would still understand what I meant to write. This is another method that comes from laziness. The brain is expecting patterns and referencing known patterns makes comprehension quicker. A pattern of 5 letters that includes 2 g's, and an i, n, & o, makes your brain recognize the word "going" because you've regularly see those letters in that pattern. Seeing it out of that pattern, still makes your brain want to see a regular pattern out of habit. Along with using the context in which the word "ginog" is in, your brain can understand the intended meaning of the sentence.

Urnedstnad?