this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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A contraction is a separate word, with its own accepted usages in the community. For example, “gonna” comes from “going to”, but is not the same, as “I’m gonna the shop, do you want anything?” sounds wrong
Yeah, "gonna" needs to be followed by a verb for it to sound right, I think, with the exception of it being used as a response affirming they'll be doing an action.
"You gonna go to the store?"
"I'm gonna, just gettin my shoes on first."
Language is...
Sometimes they end up that way (at which point they stop being contractions). However, there are also cases where distinct syntactic words end up being pronounced as phonetically single words. Or, as my morphology professor put it, "word" is not a meaningful category.
For example, consider the sentence "I'm happy". What is the subject of this sentence? The verb? What part of speach is "I'm"?