IT'S ME is informal usage

Georgina   Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 07:57 GMT
>>And your point is? Since when do we speak like we write?

But as you were writing, "Since when do we speak AS we write?" would have been preferable.

As indeed it would be were the question spoken.
Hermione   Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 08:03 GMT
"GONNA is acceptable in writing as well. You should avoid it in formal writing tho..."

I certainly don't consider it acceptable either in writing or in speech, except when reporting the dialogue of a poorly-spoken person.
Travis   Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 08:11 GMT
Hermione, obviously you haven't heard much of the everyday speech around here then... As everyday speech goes, "gonna" is nothing, considering that it seems as if every third word has one or two clitics attached to it, including clitics which are not "official" (that is, ones not like "'ve", "'ll", "'d", "'re", "'s", "'m", "n't", and so one), and some of which seem to be just a matter of them being made up on the spot by chopping the first phoneme off the start of any random one-syllable grammar word, and pasting said word to the end preceding word. And then there's how whole sentences tend to be enunciated as if they were single words, and you'll hear some words, that you'll never see in a dictionary, such as "onno" (/"ono/ --> ["o~.noU] and "on't" (/ont/ --> [o~:?]), get used a good amount here and there, but I'll stop at that, as I could ramble on about this subject forever.
Travis   Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 08:13 GMT
Ack, that was supposed to be "and so on".
JJM   Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 08:22 GMT
Yes, I don't think "gonna" is acceptable in writing at the moment - apart for its deliberate colloquial use in chatrooms and postings such as these.

While it can certainly be used in quotation marks to represent dialogue, I would counsel against using "gonna" for "going to" in formal writing. It should be considered a spelling error.

Hermione, I do take issue with your assertion that "gonna" reflects the dialogue of a "poorly-spoken person." This is patently false and a purely subjective statement. Words like "gonna/hafta/gotta" represent nothing more than the natural tendency of speakers to smooth out the flow of speech. This tendency is one of many that influence language and cause it to evolve. Many English words we consider "correct" today came about through this process (e.g., contractions such as "won't" and words such as "knight").

There's no reason to believe that "gonna," and words like it, will not eventually gain formal acceptance in the written language.

I don't think we're there yet though.
greg   Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 08:24 GMT
Do they say 'gonna' in the UK and Commonwealth or is it just Northern American ?
Travis   Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 08:35 GMT
JJM, the problem though is that the modern formal written language is rather static, except for some minor grammatical changes that now more closely reflect the general spoken language, and overall vocabulary change, whereas the informal spoken language only increases to get further from the formal written language, with the formal written language not keeping up overall. Of course, the formal spoken language is little more than a spoken analogue to the formal written language, and is generally not used for most purposes. Hence the effective result of this is that one has two different primary language forms, informal spoken, and formal written, which are only becoming increasingly distant from each other, due to both the conservativism of the formal written language and its need to be not tied much to any particular dialect group, and due to the likewise irrelevance of matters of formality and conservatism to the everyday spoken language. This is a situation that is just asking for the development of diglossia, but unfortunately it seems like diglossia will be unavoidable, simply because trying to get the written language to fit what most people actually speak means splitting the formal written language along dialect group lines, and effectively, in the long run, just asking for the formal written English language to split into a group of closely related languages. Of course, though, that will happen one way or another, but it will not be reflected in writing, if the written language is kept effectively as is.
JJM   Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 08:52 GMT
Actually, I think the "formal" written language is becoming much MORE informal these days as a result of the Internet. For the first time, millions of us are conversing instantaneously (or nearly instantaneously) across long distances by writing.
Travis   Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 09:08 GMT
JJM, I was speaking of the strict literary language, not the variants between very informal and very formal writing that can be found on much of the Internet, but which would be unlikely to find their way into edited-and-published books and journal articles and so on. When chatting online, I write English much differently than I do on here, yet at the same time, I primarily chat in informal writing, but write on here using formal writing, and the differences between the two range from orthographic conventions to grammar; for example, I tend to use significantly different modal constructions on here from those I use while chatting, which far more closely approximate what I would actually speak in everyday usage.
JJM   Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 09:43 GMT
I don't disagree that, at the far end of the written spectrum, there's still a strict literary language.

But I do see a process whereby words and terms previously always considered informal or colloquial are gradually gaining ground in the written language.
Travis   Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 09:51 GMT
While formal written English does seem to be slowly giving way in certain aspects, there's still other aspects in which it hasn't given nearly as much ground, except in, obviously, informal writing, such as the modal system which is in use, and also in that only informal writing really gets even somewhat close to the level of cliticization that is present in most actual speech. One still usually writes many things which would be generally pronounced as clitics as separate words, with the notable exceptions of certain "standardized" clitics, even if there are informal means for marking them as clitics, such as the clitic -/@/ (--> -[@]) or -/@v/ (--> -[@:v]) being still generally written as a separate "of" rather than -"a", and even when they are marked as clitics, such tends to be sporadic and inconsistent, even if their being pronounced as clitics is consistent and universal.
D   Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 15:31 GMT
My reaction to travis's post is that the standard representation of 'have to', 'have not,' 'part of,' etc in written English is a good thing which should be encouraged. The fact that 'have not' is usually pronounced the same as 'haven't' may be important in some settings, but the fact that 'part of' is never spelled 'parta' is important for quick reading, especially for people like me who don't hear words in their heads when they read.
Yijseln   Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 16:37 GMT
Is LEMME SEE acceptable in informal writing? Or is it used by poor people only?
Travis   Wednesday, April 20, 2005, 18:30 GMT
"Lemme see" (for me /lEmisi/ --> [5E~.mi.si]) is how "let me see" is very often pronounced, besides in formal speech (but most spoken North American English is informal, not formal), but such is not used in formal writing, even though it may very well show up in informal writing such as chatting.
Travis   Thursday, April 21, 2005, 02:34 GMT
Well, one thing that does get in the way of accurately representing clitics in text, and may confuse many who don't speak particular dialects, is the ability of clitics to cause changes in the host word that they attach to, and to merge with their host word to the point that one really cannot tell where the host word ends and the clitic begins, to the extent that even though they syntactically are still separate words, on a more superficial level said clitic on said host word acts more like a fusional inflection. For example, in the dialect I speak the word "I" (/aI/ --> [aI]) when merged with the "will" clitic -/l/ (--> -[5]) often becomes /Al/ (--> [A:5]) rather than /aIl/ (--> [a:I5]), the word "part" (/p@rt/ --> [p_h@:r\?]) when merged with the "of" clitic -/@/ (--> -[@]) often becomes /"p@r@/ (--> ["p_h@.r\@]) rather than /"p@rt@/ (--> ["p_h@:r\.t@]), and so on.

Such unpredictable host-clitic combinations are likely to result in confusion for those who don't speak the specific dialects in which they occur, and hence, yes, it would in that way be advantageous to use a more "abstract" representation of text, like you, D, suggest. However, though, cliticization will probably be one of the main breaking points between the spoken language, and one of the things which will in the long run result in, for non-native leaners of English, written and spoken English having to be learned separately, as written English will become more an abstract "idea-level" representation rather than anything corresponding to how /anyone/ speakes, whether formally or informally.