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

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.