so hello my name is Antonin I'm presenting today on the grammatical ization of fixing - in Dafina 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 grammatical ization grammatical ization is the process of a word becoming more grammatical so a common example would be a verb and 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 in the sentence I'm gonna the store is not correct it's because
Ghana 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 sense or an auxiliary verb used in Ave that represents a typically abstract feature 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 is its process of grammatical ization similar to that of going to and
the reason that I asked that question is because I had noticed that compared to the words Ghana and Juana which seemed to be fairly similar in terms of going to being Ghana and fixing to being finna finna is very heavily stigmatized and looked down on and I wanted to examine its process of grammatical ization 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 to 2007 teen and then the next set of data was Twitter since finna is very rarely used in writing so it was difficult to find in other sources and I took 50 tweets from each year from 2009 to 2010 Zhai examined in three ways I examined their morphological function so whether or not the beaver was included in the sentence like for example I'm finna graduate verses 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 doughnut an example of an abstract meaning would be unfinished 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 so it shows a clear bias for it to be
used to indicate an concrete meaning and then in its usage of the be verb 77 percent of the historical data used the be verb and 85 percent 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 B 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 too and so next is my data on finna in my data on finna I
noticed that 55% of the time it was used for a 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 B verb usage it has been consistent throughout the last 10 years but 29% of the time it's used with the B verb and 71% of the time it's used without and while these two are both very different from the usages of fixing two it does have the similarity that over in five hundred tokens
only two were used to indicate or were used as a non auxiliary verb and again it was similar and that it was kind of at the end of an utter so an example of a typical sentence is this one finna do my best and everything I do in the sentence is used as an auxiliary verb in front of the word in front of the verb do it's used indicate ake 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 Infini the first is that finna is much more likely than fixing to to indicate an abstract intention the second is that finna in fixing two 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 tactical aspect so I'll take my time with this but there were three mechanisms of grammatical ization
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 morphosyntactic 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 - this also signifies that finna is more able to express tense than fixing - 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 - 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
Ave there is a study that was done by Yale University in 2017 which has studied that beat verb deletion in front of feda is different than general be verb deletion in Ave so this deletion of the be verb represents something further which I believe to be the amount it's a to express tents so from this I have some conclusions and some success suggestions on future research so my primary conclusion is that Fenna is a more highly grammatical eyes form than fixing to based on the ability to express tents to a higher degree than fixing to
is able to my second point is that more research is needed in its ability to express tents as they've been going over my project again I've been discussing with my friend Ian how much Finn is able to express tents and in what ways and what we found is that it's arguable if it's Weibull able or not to express the past tense being used with the word it was and it's also arguable whether or not it can be used with other tents words such as will in order to express different kinds of tents if it isn't
able to be used with these other tense verbs that shows a very advanced degree of grammatical ization because that ability to express tents is being shown through the fact that it cannot be used with other tents words since that will 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 grammatical ization Affinia is very similar to typical processes of grammatical ization in
english and how the mechanisms of it being grammatical eyes are very similar to other mechanisms mechanizations in english the continued stigmatization of Fenna 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 is valid so for those of us in this room who are you know a little more linguistically interested we should be very aware of how our personal biases may be affecting opinions of language
because things like racism can come out and how people are discussing words that they like or don't like and their opinion of those words [Applause] any questions yeah with the Hat oh token that's just one example of it being used yeah right there hmm I actually didn't look at that so I'd have to go back and examine the data yes I did not examine that I only examined the three things the beaver deletion the auxiliary verb and the semantics of it so any other questions okay thank you [Applause]
