Converging variations and the emergence of horizontal links : To-contraction in American English
The guiding question of this paper is how (horizontal) connections are established when new items enter the network of constructions. It presents a quantitative, corpus-based study of the development of to-contraction (e.g. want to > wanna) in American English since the 19th century. From a plethora of earlier forms, gonna, wanna and gotta emerge, first as representations of phonetic reduction, bu