gonna (was: double a-prefixing?)

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jun 27, 2004, at 1:36 AM, Douglas Bigham wrote:

> ...On a separate, but mildly related, tangent, does anyone know
> anything about
> the "gonna to" phenomena?  ex. "I'm gonna to do it.".  I searched the
> archives
> with no luck.

hmmm..  i hadn't been aware of this, but there are piles of google hits
on "gonna to", many of them of the sort doug cites.  mostly from song
lyrics, apparently, but that's not so surprising, since most people
don't represent casual speech in their own writing, while transcribers
of lyrics often try to capture such features.

still, you could worry about the competence of the transcribers.
here's the webfitz.com version of the lyrics for the first few verses
of the ames brothers' version of the standard "Undecided" (this is
copied and pasted in, not re-typed):

You say yes
Then it's no
You say you'll stay
Then you go
Your undecided now
So what are you going to do

Fisrt you say you do and then you don't
And then you say you will and then you won't
Your undecided now
So what are you gonna to do

Now you want to play
And then it's no
And when you say you'll stay
That's when you go
Your undecided now
So what are you gonna to do

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), wanting to *hear* this performance,
since it's possible that the transcription is an orthographic blending
of <gonna> and <going to> -- but i assume doug has examples from speech