So hello, my name is Anne Tynan.
I'm presenting today on
the grammaticalization
of "fixing to" into "finna."
And so to start off
I thought I might
cover a few questions that
may have come from my title.
The first being what
is grammaticalization?
Grammaticalization
is the process
of a word becoming
more grammatical.
So a common example would be a
verb becoming an auxiliary verb
like with the word "going
to" becoming "gonna."
That's why the sentence "I'm
going to the store" is correct
and the sentence "I'm gonna
the store" is not correct.
It's because "gonna"
has a limited function
as an auxiliary
verb that does not
allow it to be used in the
same way as "going to."
And the next question I wanted
to address is what is "finna"?
"Finna" is a s--
an auxiliary verb used in AAVE
that represents a typically
abstract future intention.
So an example sentence would
be "I'm finna graduate."
Going into my process I had
two main research questions.
The first was how did
"fixing to" become "finna."
And the second was how was its
process of gramamaticalization
similar to that of "going to"?
And the reason I
asked that question
is because I had noticed that
compared to the words "gonna"
and "wanna," which seem to
be fairly similar in terms
of "going to" being "gonna"
and "fixing to" being "finna,"
"finna" is very heavily
stigmatized and looks down on.
And I wanted to examine its
process of grammaticalization
in order to compare it
and discuss how racism
affects linguistic opinions.
So going into my
research I decided
to use two data sources.
The first was the BYU
corpus in which I used 100
from the historical corpus,
which was from 1851 to 1968,
and 100 tokens from the
contemporary corpus, which
was from 2003-2017.
And then the next set
of data was Twitter
since "finna" is very
rarely used in writing,
so was difficult to
find in other sources.
And I took 50 tweets from
each year from 2009 to 2018.
Each of these 700 tokens
I examined in three ways.
I examined their morphological
function, so whether or not
the "be" verb was included in
the sentence, like for example
"I'm finna graduate"
versus "finna graduate."
The second thing I examined
was the syntactic function, so
whether or not it was being
used as an auxiliary verb.
And the third thing
that I examined
was the semantic function,
so whether or not it
indicated a concrete
or abstract meaning.
So an example of
a concrete meaning
was "I'm finna eat a
donut," and an example
of an abstract meaning would
be "I'm finna graduate."
So going into my results.
I'll start with "fixing to."
In the examination of
its semantic usage,
so whether or not it was
concrete or abstract.
97% of the historical
usages were concrete
and 85% of the
contemporary usages
were concrete, such
as a clear bias for it
to be used to indicate
an concrete meaning.
And then in its usage
of the "be" verbs,
77% of the historical
data used the "be" verb
and 85% of the contemporary
used the "be" verb.
And you might
notice in this slide
that the auxiliary
usage is not included.
And that's because it
was almost exclusively
used as an auxiliary verb
with only one instance of it
not being an auxiliary verb.
And that usage was
a little unclear,
it was similar to
how you might say,
as an answer to a question,
"yeah, I'm gonna."
So an example of
a common sentence
I may have come
across while analyzing
was "make him wait some more.
If he so much as looks like
he's "fixing to" leave,
keep him in place
with one phone call."
In this sentence
"fixing to" is used
to indicate a concrete meaning.
It's used with the "be"
verb as in "he is," and it's
used as an auxiliary verb.
So that is a very
standard sentence
that represents most of what
you would see while looking
at usages of "fixing to."
And so next is my
data on "finna."
In my data on "finna," I
noticed that 55% of the time it
was used for concrete
meaning and 45%
for an abstract meaning.
But, interestingly, in
the last five years,
it's become to be more
and more increasingly used
to indicate something abstract.
And second, in terms
of "be" verb usage,
it has been consistent
throughout the last 10 years.
But 29% of the time it's
used with the "be" verb
and 71% of the time
it's used without.
And while these two were both
very different from the usages
of "fixing to," it does
have the similarity
that over in 500 tokens only
two were used to indicate--
or were used as a
non-auxiliary verb.
And, again, it was
similar in that it
was at the end of an utterance.
So an example of a typical
sentence is this one,
"I finna do my best
and everything I do."
In the sentence it's
used as an auxiliary verb
in front of the word-- in
front of the verb "do."
It's used to indicate a c--
abstract meaning, and it's
used without the "be" verb.
So what does all
this mean, basically?
I came up with three main
points for what all of this data
came to say about
"fixing to" and "finna."
The first is that "finna"
is much more likely
than "fixing to" to indicate
an abstract intention.
The second is that
"finna" and "fixing to"
are both almost exclusively
used as auxiliary verbs.
And the third is
that "finna" does not
require the "be" verb as
frequently as "fixing to" does.
And this point is the
one that I'll base
the rest of my discussion on.
So from this we get into
the more technical aspect,
so I'll take my time with this.
But there were three mechanisms
of grammaticalization
at play in this.
So this is explaining
how it became
"finna" from "fixing to."
The first is semantic
bleaching, which
is that the meaning
became more abstract.
It means something that's not
quite as specific as before.
Rather than a specific
near-future intention,
it can indicate a future
intention in general.
The second was the
most obvious, which is
the morpho-phonemic reduction.
This is the physical form itself
shortening from "fixing to"
to "finna," which was obvious
when beginning the project.
And then the third one, that
I found the most interesting,
was the morpho-syntactic change.
This is the change that
allows for the "be" verb
to be deleted in
front of "finna"
in a much more typical way
than in front of "fixing to."
This also signifies that "finna"
is more able to express tense
than "fixing to" is
because it does not require
the "be" verb in
front of it in order
to express the
tense of a sentence
since "finna" in and of itself
expresses a future tense,
whereas "fixing to" does
not have that ability
to the same degree.
And since I'm sure some
here may know some amount
about "be" verb
deletion in AAVE,
there is a study that was done
by Yale University in 2017,
which has studied that "be" verb
deletion in front of "finna"
is different than general
"be" deletion in AAVE.
So this deletion
of the "be" verb
represents something
further, which
I believe to be the amount
it's able to express tense.
So from this I have
some conclusions
and some suggestions
on future research.
So my primary conclusion
is that "finna"
is a more highly grammaticalized
form than "fixing to"
based on it's ability to
express tense to a higher degree
than "fixing to" is able to.
My second point is
that more research
is needed in its ability
to express tense.
As I've been going
over my project again,
I have been discussing
with my friend, Ian,
how much "finna" is able to
express tense and in what ways.
And what we found is
that it's arguable
if it's able or not to
express the past tense being
used with the word "was."
And it's also arguable
whether or not
it can be used with other tense
words such as "will" in order
to express different
kinds of tense.
If it isn't able to be used
with these other tense verbs,
that shows a very advanced
degree of grammaticalization.
Because that ability to express
tense is being shown through
the fact that it cannot be used
with other tense words since
that would make
it ungrammatical.
And, finally, to wrap
up my presentation.
I wanted to talk about my
original motivations going
into this and that
is how racism can
affect opinions of language.
While I've been
doing my research,
I have largely shown how the
process of grammaticalization
of "finna" is very similar
to typical processes
of grammaticalization
in English and how
the mechanisms of it
being grammaticalized
are very similar to other
mechanizations in English.
The continued
stigmatization of "finna"
is not a reflection
on the word itself,
it's a reflection on how
attitudes from our society
are being projected
onto a single word.
And, in this case,
it's how racism
is affecting people's
views of whether
or not a view it's valid.
So for those of us
in this room who
are a little more
linguistically interested,
we should be very aware
of our personal biases
maybe affecting
opinions of language.
Because things like
racism can come out
in how people are
discussing words
that they like or don't like and
their opinion of those words.
Thank you.
Any questions?
Yeah, with the hat.
What do you mean by token?
Token that's just one
example of it being used.
Yeah, right there.
Did you notice varying
rates of "be" deletion
depending on the subject
that you proceded,
or is it just across the board?
I actually didn't look at that.
So I'd have to go back
and examine the data.
Yes.
I had a question.
I was going to ask about subject
deletion along with the "be"
deletion.
Did you ever see and
use "be" [INAUDIBLE]??
I did not examine that.
I only examined the
three things the "be"
verb deletion, the auxiliary
verb and the semantics of it.
So any other questions?
Thank you.
