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Wanna Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Richard Hudson
Richard Hudson*
Affiliation:
University College London
*
University College London, 57 Park Avenue North, London N8 7RS, United Kingdom, [dick@ling.ucl.ac.uk]
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Abstract

This article addresses general questions about the organization of grammar via a detailed discussion of a small, but well-explored, area of English: the contraction of want to to wanna. It distinguishes three general approaches to the analysis of wanna: a phonological rule, lexicalization, or a derivational rule. Each approach has a different set of strengths, but they all have weaknesses as well. The article then offers a new analysis in terms of REALIZATION, which combines the strengths of all the previous analyses. This analysis, which is based on the theory of word grammar, accounts not only for all the well-known syntactic and morphological constraints on this contraction, but also for a fact that has not been noted before: that, for some speakers, the last vowel alternates in just the same idiosyncratic way as that of to, which suggests strongly that in some sense wanna contains to as well as want. For these (but not all) speakers, the proposed analysis recognizes two words (sublexemes of WANT and TOinf) at the level of syntax and a single form ({wanna}, containing variants of {want} and {to}) at the level of form; the relations between these words and forms, and between the forms and their phonological realizations, are defined by a declarative network.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 82 , Issue 3 , September 2006 , pp. 604 - 627
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America

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