THE MORPHOLEXICAL NATURE OF ENGLISH TO-CONTRACTION

The forms represented orthographically as (wanna), (hafta), (gonna), (gotta), (oughta), (usta), and (sposta) have standardly been analyzed as involving a syntactic rule or cliticization operation called to-contraction. Occasionally it has been suggested that the forms in question have been 'lexicalized', i.e., WANNA and HAFTA are synchronically distinct lexemes from WANT and HAVE. I argue here that neither approach is correct. The syntactic accounts are wrong to assume that the relation between wanna and want to must be syntactic, and the lexicalization accounts are wrong to assume that there is no synchronic relation: the link is one of derivational morphology. A morpholexical rule suffixes /tu/ ~ /tal to the base lexemes to form derived lexemes such as WANNA. These to-derivatives are headed morphological structures, as described by Stump 1994. They inflect on their heads, not their edges; they are synonymous with their bases but have different subcategorization and more colloquial style associations. Various morphological and phonological idiosyncrasies indicate that the derived lexemes are morphologically compound, but their sharing of the lexical idiosyncrasies of the base lexemes show that they contain those bases as heads. All the syntactic phenomena that have been claimed to be relevant to the debate over to-contraction fall into place under the assumptions advocated here, and some new insights emerge, particularly with regard to the 'liberal dialects' where the pronunciation written (wanna) has a wider distribution than in most American dialects.*