Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T03:30:55.408Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

To-contract or not to-contract? That is the question1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2013

JUDITH M. BROADBENT  and
EVI SIFAKI
JUDITH M. BROADBENT
Affiliation:
University of Roehampton, Department of Media, Culture and Language, Southlands College, Roehampton Lane, London SW15 5SL, [email protected], [email protected]
EVI SIFAKI
Affiliation:
University of Roehampton, Department of Media, Culture and Language, Southlands College, Roehampton Lane, London SW15 5SL, [email protected], [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The focus of this article is what Anderson (2005: 72) describes as ‘another chronic puzzle in English’, the case of to-contraction. We set out to show that the extent and nature of to-contraction has not been captured by the literature to date, because researchers have been concerned with two forms which are no longer synchronic to-contractions: wanna and gonna, and have taken a syntactic or morphological approach. On the basis of new phonological data from British English varieties we argue that the reduction of /t/ in to should be taken as evidence of to-contraction. We claim that to is a phonological clitic and to-contraction is simply the incorporation of the clitic to into the preceding prosodic word.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , November 2013 , pp. 513 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

This paper has been through a number of drafts and has been delivered at different venues. We would like to thank the participants of the CRELL seminar group, University of Roehampton and of ICLCE 3, London University. We would particularly like to thank Manfred Krug, Nicolas Ballier and Annabelle Mooney. We are deeply grateful to the British Library Sound Archive for free access to their online resources. Finally, we are deeply indebted to April McMahon and to our two anonymous reviewers. Needless to say, all omissions and errors are our own.

References

Anderson, Stephen. 2005. Aspects of the theory of clitics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Andrésen, Bjørn S. 1968. Pre-glottalisation in English standard pronunciation. Oslo: Norwegian University Press.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1980. Wanna and the gradience of auxiliaries. In Brettschneider, Gunter & Lehmann, Christian (eds.), Wege zur Universalien Forschung, 292–9. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1981. Consonance, dissonance, and grammaticality: The case of wanna. Language and Communication 1, 89–206.Google Scholar
Booij, Geert. 1996. Cliticization as prosodic integration: The case of Dutch. The Linguistic Review 13, 219–42.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan W. 1971. Contraction and the transformational cycle in English. Unpublished MS. Distributed by Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel & Traugott, Elizabeth. 2005. Lexicalization and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Broadbent, Judith. M. 2008. t-to-r in West Yorkshire English. English Language and Linguistics 12 (1), 141–68.Google Scholar
Broadbent, Judith. M. 2009. The amn't gap: The view from West Yorkshire. Journal of Linguistics 45, 251–84.Google Scholar
Broadbent, Judith M. In prep. West Yorkshire phonology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2001. Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan 2010. Language, use and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Carr, Philip. 1991. Lexical properties of post-lexical rules: Post-lexical derived environment and the Elsewhere Condition. Lingua 85, 255–68.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1973. Conditions on transformations. In Anderson, Stephen R. & Kiparsky, Paul (eds.), A festschrift for Morris Halle. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Lasnik, Howard. 1978. A remark on contraction. Linguistic Inquiry 9, 268–74.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Amsterdam: Mouton.Google Scholar
Docherty, Gerard J., Foulkes, Paul, Milroy, James, Milroy, Lesley & Walshaw, David. 1997. Descriptive adequacy in phonology: A variationist perspective. Journal of Linguistics 33, 275–310.Google Scholar
Emonds, Joseph. 1977. Comments on the paper by Lightfoot. In Culicover, Peter W., Wasow, Thomas & Akmajian, Adrian (eds.), Formal syntax. New York: Academic Press. 239–47.Google Scholar
Garrett, Andrew. 2012. The historical syntax problem: Reanalysis and directionality. In Dianne, Jonas, Whitman, John & Garrett, Andrew (eds.), Grammatical change: origins, nature outcomes, 52–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi. 2006. English words: A linguistic introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hudson, Richard. 2000. *I amn't. Language 76, 297–323.Google Scholar
Hudson, Richard. 2006. Wanna revisited. Language 83 (2), 604–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jensen, John T. 2000. Against ambisyllabicity. Phonology 17 (2), 187–235.Google Scholar
Kahn, Daniel. 1976. Syllable-based generalizations in English phonology. PhD dissertation, MIT, distributed by Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Krug, Manfred. 2000. Emerging English modals: A corpus-based study of grammaticalization. Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Leslie, David. 1983. Left capture and British voiceless stop allophony. Unpublished MS.Google Scholar
Leslie, David. 1989. Lenition systems. Paper presented at the London Phonology Seminar, SOAS.Google Scholar
Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1997. The morpholexical nature of English to-contraction. Language 73, 79–102.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Radford, Andrew. 2004. English syntax: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sag, Ivan & Fodor, Janet. 1994. Extraction without traces. In Aronovich, R., Byrne, W., Preuss, S. & Senturia, M. (eds.), Proceedings of the 13th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 365–84. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 1995. The prosodic structure of function words. In Beckman, Jill, Walsh Dickey, Laura & Urbanczyk, Suzanne (eds.), Papers in Optimality Theory, 439–70. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications.Google Scholar
Trousdale, Graeme. 2002. Variable ambisyllabicity. English Language and Linguistics 6 (2), 267–82.Google Scholar
Wells, John C. 1990. Syllabification and allophony. In Ramsaran, Susan (ed.), Studies in the pronunciation of English: A commemorative volume in honour of A. C. Gimson, 76–86. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold & Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1983. Cliticization vs inflection: English N'T. Language 59, 502–13.Google Scholar