GRAMMATICALIZATION OF SEMI-MODAL VERBS IN SPOKEN DISCOURSE: LINGUOCULTURAL VARIATION (AME VS BRE)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/2522-4077-2026-216-47Keywords:
grammaticalization, semi-modal verbs, spoken discourse, corpus linguistics, linguocultural variation, American English, British EnglishAbstract
цесами граматикалізації та культурно зумовленими комунікативними The article presents a corpus-based analysis of the grammaticalization of the semi-modal verbs gonna, wanna, gotta in contemporary spoken English, with special emphasis on linguocultural variation between American and British English. The relevance of the study lies in the growing influence of spoken interaction, media discourse, and digital communication on the grammatical system of English, as well as in the need for empirical evidence of cross-varietal differences in the use of grammaticalized forms. The aim of the article is to investigate the grammaticalization of the semi-modal verbs gonna, wanna, gotta, to identify their grammatical and functional-semantic properties in spoken discourse, and to conduct a contrastive analysis of their usage in American and British linguocultures. The empirical data are drawn from the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and the NOW Corpus, which ensures the representativeness of the material and enables quantitative comparison across registers and discourse types. The corpus analysis demonstrates that the semi-modal verbs under study emerged through the reduction of the constructions going to, want to, and have got to and display high frequency in spoken language and informal genres, while remaining stylistically marked in formal written registers. The findings also reveal different degrees of grammaticalization: gonna and gotta show a higher level of grammatical abstraction, whereas wanna retains traces of lexical meaning. From a linguocultural perspective, the results indicate that these forms are more frequent and more widely accepted in American English, while in British English they preserve stronger stylistic markedness. The study confirms the close relationship between grammaticalization processes and culturally conditioned communicative norms in contemporary English
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