Some Scribblings on Nasal Gobbling

In my informal midwestern speech (raised in suburban Minnesota and rural Wisconsin), I can say the following:

1.

I’mʌ nʌ go

‘I’m going to go.’

(spelled dialectally as: ‘I’muh nuh go’, or maybe, ‘I’ma na go’).

In this short note, I sketch the series of phonological changes at play in deriving (1) in an attempt to understand my own personal speech patterns. 

I did an informal survey of the students in my undergraduate syntax class (18 students), and most of them said (1) is acceptable, but I do not know if there are any geographical generalizations about where it is used.

I assume that the underlying form is something like the following (written with English orthography):

2. I am going to go.

I rarely pronounce -ing with an engma [ng]. Mostly, I pronounce it with -in.

3. I am goin to go.

In my English, unstressed infinitival (and prepositional) ‘to’ is very generally pronounced as tʌ, which can also be slightly voiced as shown in (5):

4. I am goin tʌ go.

5. I am goin dʌ go.

From there, the nasal of -in gobbles up the following voiced dental:

6. I am goi nʌ go.

I find the same nasal gobbling with 'trying to'. And both seem related to wanna-contraction. But, I think that (5) itself is infrequent. Rather, (5) seems to prefer the following reduced form of ‘going’:

7. I am gʌ nʌ go.

In (7), [o] is changed to [ʌ] (o --> ʌ), and the [i] of the suffix -in is dropped. Alternatively, it may be that the progressive suffix is really -Vn (not -ing), and the V is generally filled with an epenthetic lax [i]. So in (7), the V of -Vn is simply not syllabified (not literally deleted).

Nasal gobbling in (7) involves nasal spreading auto-segmentally to the following C slot:

8. n t ʌ

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C V

Given the representation in (8), the nasal docs to the initial C, delinking the [t], yielding the correct form: nʌ.

The form in (7) can be stressed (indicated by underlining):

9.

Q: Are you refusing to go to your class?

A: I am gʌ nʌ go.

But stressed or not stressed, the vowel [o] is not possible:

10. *I am go nʌ go.

The facts in (7) and (10) suggest that we are dealing with a kind of verbal suppletion. The verb ‘go’ in English can be realized as [go] in most contexts, but can also be realized as [gʌ] in some contexts, and it is not explained away as a phonetic vowel reduction (because the latter can be stressed). 

The alternation between [go] and [gʌ] similar to the fact that ‘do’ [du] can be realized as [dʌ] as in the word ‘does’ (which can also be stressed).

From (7), the auxiliary ‘am’ can be contracted:

11. I’m gʌ nʌ go.

About the contraction in (11), I am assuming that the auxiliary am is bimorphemic a-m, and that in (11) only the second morpheme is being spelled out. Part of the reason for this assumption is the presence of [m] in all 1SG pronouns exceptive nominative: me, my, mine. This series suggest that 1SG in English is [m].

Then the 1SG nasal of the auxiliary gobbles up the following voiced velar:

12. I’mʌ nʌ go.

Note in (12) that the nasal gobbling is not accompanied by any change in the place of articulation of the nasal. (12) involves a bilabial nasal, not a velar nasal. So the [g] has completely disappeared from the utterance. 

I have no idea how common the form in (12) is in the United States. But for me personally, it is the most natural way of speaking.

If the auxiliary is not contracted, nasal gobbling is less acceptable:

13. a. *I am mʌ nʌ go.

b. *I a mʌ nʌ go.

Nasal gobbling involves the nasal spreading auto-segmentally to the following C slot:

14. m g ʌ n ʌ

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C V C V

Given the representation in (14), the 1SG nasal docks to the initial C, delinking the [g], yielding the correct form: mʌ nʌ. This is the same nasal gobbling rule as seen in (8) above. 

One thing to notice is that these reductions do not occur with the main verb use of ‘going to’:

15. a. *I am gʌ nʌ the beach.

Intended: ‘I am going to the beach.’

b. *I’mʌ nʌ the beach.

Intended: ‘I am going to the beach.’

Let’s see where the chain of reductions stops. First, the unstressed preposition ‘to’ can also be pronounced tʌ

16. I am going tʌ the beach.

But the following is completely unacceptable:

17.

a. *I am goi nʌ the beach.

b. *I am gʌ nʌ the beach.

So it seems that o-->ʌ for ‘go’ and nasal gobbling are not possible for the main for ‘go’. This suggests that the internal structure of main verb going is different from the internal structure of auxiliary verb going, in a way which blocks nasal gobbling and suppletion for main verbs, but I do not pursue that here.

Another thing to notice is that the changes only occur if ‘be’ in ‘be going to’ is finite:

18. a. He may be going to go.

b. He must be going to go (based on what I know).

c. To be going to

While the sentences in (18) are uncommon, the ones in (19) sound unacceptable to me:

19. a. *He may be gʌ nʌ go.

b. *He must be gʌ nʌ go.

c. *To be gʌ nʌ go.

If a negation (or adverbs) intervenes between the auxiliary and ‘go’, the following form is possible:

20. I’m not gʌ nʌ go

But not:

21.

a. I’m not mʌ nʌ go

b. *I’mʌ not nʌ go

So nasal gobbling seems to require phonological adjacency.

Nasal gobbling is found in many places in English phonology, which are well-known, so I will not repeat them here. Off the top of my head, I know of: ‘I don’t know’ (‘I dunno’), ‘something’ (smthn), ‘pumpkin’ (pungkin). 

In the cases that I am considering in this paper, the nasal is always part of a function word (e.g., the -ing suffix, or the auxiliary ‘am’), and the target consonant is also part of a function word (e.g., infinitival to, future going). Generalizing (8) and (14) we have, the following rule:

22. Nasal Gobbling

Structural description: N is non-syllabified nasal consonant of any place of articulation. xy are the first two segments of a non-stressed function word.

N x[stop] y[vowel]

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C         V

Structural change: the nasal optionally docks to the initial C, delinking the x segment.