Why 'Gonna' Works

Living in Europe you’ll meet plenty of English learners ill-adopting certain informal speech patterns from fluent speakers. This leads to a native speaker like myself to hear these funny dialectical differences used ungrammatically, which leads me to wonder: If they can be used ungrammatically, what is the underlying grammar?? Today, I wanna look at the following family of contractions:

Going to    -> Gonna
Got to      -> Gotta
Want to     -> Wanna
Need to     -> Needa
Have to     -> Hafta

At first glance one might assume that these are the results of lazy speech, that the pattern of verb + to prompts speakers to glob those sounds together into one word. However, if this were truly the case, we’d expect this contraction to appear wherever we find verb + to. Interestingly enough, this is not what we find.

Let’s take the following sentences for example:

I'm going to eat this sandwich.
I'm going to my house.

Only the first sentence still rings grammatical after the contraction:

I'm gonna eat this sandwich.
I'm gonna my house.

Why is this? What is the underlying logic behind words like ‘gonna’, ‘gotta’, ‘wanna’, etc.?

You’re gonna what your house

English speakers who use the gonna contraction may feel that their ears seem to expect a verb after gonna. In fact, attaching a verb right after gonna forms a grammatical sentence:

I'm gonna (sell) my house.

The reason this works is because gonna and going to are actually different. While going to is simply a verb followed by a preposition, gonna is a modal verb and indicates that the following verb is yet to happen. They represent different things and thus serve different grammatical functions.

Modal and semi-modal verbs

I’ll try and be as brief as I can in explaining but if you’re interested you can read more about them here and here

Basically, modal verbs are verbs that indicates the modality of the following verb, some examples are ‘could’, ‘would’, ‘will’, ‘should’, ‘must’, etc.

On the other hand semi-modal verbs are standard verbs followed by ’to’ that are act like a modal verb (and they’re usually a little more flexible in terms of tense). Examples of these include: ‘ought to’, ‘want to’, ‘have got to’, etc.

If all of this is true, we might expect other semi-modal verbs to be contracted into modal verbs, and in fact we do:

You need to stop
You needa stop

While if ’need’ is used as anything other than a semi-modal verb the contraction fails:

There's a need to stop
There's a needa stop

Why’s all this happening?

The reason for this is likely due to a process called grammaticalization. Which, to spare us again from the rigorous details that you can find here, is a linguistic phenomenon in which words that represent objects, actions, descriptions, etc. start to serve grammatical functions.

A relevant example of grammaticalization in English is the transformation from noun to modal verb that was undertaken by ‘will’. Our version of ‘will’ is almost entirely used as a future tense marker (I will eat, for example), but it can also sometimes be a verb, such as in I am willing to try. In Old English, this word began as a noun (like in where there's a will, there's a way) slowly transforming into a verb synonymous with our Modern English to want or to wish which finally grammaticalized into our modern day modal auxiliary:

I have a will to eat    Noun
I will to eat           Verb
I will eat              Auxiliary

If your interested, you can read more about how ‘will’ developed here

Any of this sound familiar? While the verb to go still does represent the tangible act of a subject moving towards something, it began to be used semi-modally. Thus, like will, this use of the word is diverging from its original usage and is turning into a grammatical marker, and in this case, diverging it’s pronunciation with it.

He s’gonna sell his house

Inspired by this video on the potential paths that the English language may take in the future, I thought it would be cool to try and extrapolate this change to catch a glimpse of a potential future English. It seems to me that ‘gonna’, ‘wanna’, and ‘wanna’ are the top contenders in becoming standard modal auxiliaries:

Something very interesting here, ‘gonna’ is already irregular. Speakers using the ‘gonna’ contraction sometimes say Imma or Immuna when speaking in the first person:

I               mma/munna
You             gon/gonna
He/she/it       gon/gonna
We              gon/gonna
You/Y'all       gon/gonna
They            gon/gonna

It is also not too speculative to predict that gotta may interact with have got to and end up sharing its irregularity

I               v'gotta
You             v'gotta
He/she/it       s'gotta
We              v'gotta
You/Y'all       v'gotta
They            v'gotta

This is what it might look like:

They gonna leave soon
He s'gotta pay us
Who wanna run the field

This is the part of modern linguistics I find most fascinating, the process of viewing language not as an object meant to be spoken correctly or incorrectly, but instead as an ever-evolving organism that can be studied and classified. Whenever a variation in speech arises, there’s almost always a way to describe it in terms more nuanced than a dismissive “lazy speech”. As we’ve seen, these shifts in language are not errors per se, but manifestations of an organic process. These variations do indeed have their own internal grammar rules.

Language is constantly evolving as people subconsciously adapt to the speech around them, shaping and reshaping how we communicate over time. Seeing it in this way makes language evolution resemble a massive game of telephone. While this game inevitably distorts meaning, languages always maintain a hidden grammatical structure, one that, with careful research, can be described and understood.